Paranal All-Night Trails

A starry night of Paranal Mountain in the Atacama Desert of Chile is captured in this nearly all-night sequence of fisheye photos. Paranal is home to the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope (VLT). The yellow light from the dome is a laser guide star for Adaptive Optics (AO), a technology that monitors the high altitude atmospheric turbulence in order to improve the performance of optical systems by reducing the effects of rapidly changing optical distortion.