14 DAY TRIAL // Gabriel Brammer, a Photo Ambassador for the European Southern Observatory (ESO), was recently able to compile this breathtaking view of a portion of the night sky, as it appears from Cerro Paranal, in the Chilean Andes. This image also depicts the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, which appear as two brighter smudges above the point where the laser light vanishes.
The image was collected from a spot next to the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is in fact an installation made up of four massive optical telescopes and four smaller guidance telescopes. Together, the 8 observatories make up the VLT Interferometer (VLTI), the best optical telescope in the world.
Each of the four VLT Unit Telescopes is housed in a building 25 meters (82 feet) tall and features an 8.2-meter (27-foot) mirror. The four tracking telescopes are just 1.8 meters (6 feet) across and are used for target acquisition. This image also shows one of the UT creating what is known as a laser guide star, an object in the night sky that is used to calibrate adaptive optics imaging.
Brammer was able to create this peculiar-looking image – which resembles a crystal ball filled with stars – by stitching together several wide-angle images of the same area of the sky, taken from different angles. The VLT, located atop Cerro Paranal, is renowned for the clear skies overhead. Multiple telescopes are strung alongside Chile's mountaintops, since the Atacama Desert is the driest in the world.