14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have recently released a new image showing the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia space telescope as it was heading out into space, towards the L2 Lagrangian point that it uses for an orbit.
The image was snapped by the Very Large Survey Telescope (VST), located right next to the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal Observatory, in the Atacama Desert of Chile. When this photo was captured, Gaia was already 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) away from Earth.
The 2.6-meter (8.5-foot) VST was able to seen an object as small as Gaia through its monster OmegaCAM instrument, which features a 268-megapixel CCD camera. This device has the ability to image a portion of the night sky about 4 times larger than the diameter of the full Moon.
The two images above were collected 6.5 minutes apart from each other, on January 23, 2014. Gaia launched into space on December 19, 2013, aboard a Russian-built Soyuz rocket, from the ESA Kourou Spaceport in French Guiana, South America. The telescope is currently being calibrated ahead of starting its survey of 1 billion stars in the Milky Way.