14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have just released this amazing image of the night sky, taken at the organization's Paranal Observatory, south of Antofagasta, Chile. The facility is perched atop the Cerro Paranal peak, at an altitude of 2,635 meters (8,645 feet) above sea level.
ESO Photo Ambassador Babak A. Tafreshi collected this long-exposure image, which reveals the apparent paths of multiple single stars in the skies above the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The night sky is extremely clear in the Atacama Desert, since it almost never rains at this location.
All of the stars in this image belong to the core of the Milky Way, which can usually be seen with great precision from the VLT site. The telescope is made up of four primary units and four Auxiliary Telescopes, three of which are visible in this photograph.
The auxiliary telescopes have a diameter of 1.8 meters (6 feet) each, and can be moved in different configuration for particular studies. The four, 8.2-meter (27-foot) Unit Telescopes (UT) are the main instruments at VLT, which is currently cataloged as one of the world's best optical observatories.