Break of Dawn

Morning twilight arrives at Cerro Paranal Observatory in the barren Atacama Desert. With its amazing dark, steady, and transparent sky, Paranal is home to some of the world’s leading telescopes. Operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) the Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located on Paranal, composed of four 8-meter telescopes and smaller auxiliary telescopes, each 1.8 m in aperture, which are photographed here and each is and essential elements of the VLT interferometer. In the sky the southern Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud appear on the right.