360-degree View of The Very Large Telescope

This 360-degree panorama displays the starry sky of Chile and stunning view of the Milky Way arching above Cerro Paranal observatory; one of the world’s best sites for astronomical observations and the location for the Very Large Telescope array. Move the slider on the image to see the labels. As noted by the photographer “The four 8-meter and four 1.8 m (AT) diameter telescopes of the VLT are all observing under the Milky Way arch during this very dark Southern hemisphere spring night. Bright Jupiter is high in the sky. The large (LMC) and small (SMC) Magellanic clouds are visible to the left of the picture while another galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), is also visible just to the right of the telescopes. The picture also shows two ‘astronomical’ lights, the zodiacal light crossing the Milky Way center vertically and the Gegenschein, usually very difficult to observe, below Jupiter on the right hand side of the image. Cerro Armazones, located 20km away from Paranal, is another summit visible at the far right. It is where the 42-meter European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be built by the end of this decade.”