Incidentally, what an absolute power move by Ann Savage. Imagine you're a grad student, you walk in to the control room of a brand new, state of the art telescope, the pride of both the UK and Australian astronomical communities, and you find the commissioning astronomer and the author of the telescope control system discussing what word to use to publicise the capabilities of the new telescope. You listen for a moment and then tell them they should use your name!
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The AAT's Ann plate inspired similar stunts during the commissioning of later telescopes. One particularly noteworthy example is the @esoastronomy's Very Large Telescope (VLT) Unit Telescope 1 writing its own name in 1998.
By this point writing with starlight by moving the telescope was no longer an impressive feat. What was relatively new, however, was active optics systems as used by the VLT's huge 8 metre diameter primary mirror. This is a system of actuators which push on the back of the mirror, exactly compensating for gravitational flexure as the telescope moves, and so allowing a relatively thin mirror to be used without the images becoming distorted.
That same system could be (ab)used to intentionally distort the mirror in carefully chosen ways, causing the images of stars to be distorted into the shape of the letters V, then L, then T.
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