Recent advances in the technology of rotating liquid-mirrors now make feasible the construction of large optical telescopes for dedicated survey programs. Two three-metre-class astronomical telescopes have been built and asix-metre telescope is under construction. These instruments observe in zenith-pointing mode, using drift-scanning CCD cameras to record continuous imaging of a strip of sky typically 20 arcmin wide. This enables them to observe of order 100 square degrees of sky with an

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... ation time of a few minutes per night. Data can be co-added from night to night in order to increase the depth of the survey. Liquid-mirror telescopes are particularly wellsuited to surveys using broad or intermediate bandwidth filters to obtain photometric redshifts and spectral energy distributions for faint galaxies and quasars.