Watching our Cosmic Neighborhood from Chile's Atacama Desert | ESO

Watching our Cosmic Neighborhood from Chile's Atacama Desert | ESO

This shows the stunning night sky above three of the Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Conditions at the site make it one of the best places on Earth for astronomical observations with the band of the Milky Way, as well as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible to the naked eye.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, at distances of about 160,000 and 200,000 light-years, respectively. They are irregular dwarf galaxies, gravitationally bound to our more massive home galaxy. The Small Magellanic Cloud and the lowest part of the Milky Way appear here bathed in green airglow, very faint light emitted by oxygen atoms high up in the atmosphere.

While only three telescopes are pictured in this image, there are, in total, four ATs feeding light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). These telescopes, each with a 1.8-meter main mirror, can be moved along tracks to thirty observing points. They all look at the same target, creating a single ‘virtual’ telescope the size of the separation between the telescopes. These separate views allow the VLTI to discern varying levels of detail. Among other breakthroughs, the ATs have taken the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy—WOH G64, a red supergiant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Image Description: This image shows three white Auxiliary Telescopes, at the bottom of the frame. In the background, in blue and green colors, and yellow and red towards the horizon, the night sky is full of stars with the white Milky Way band vertically in the middle of the picture. On its right, the two white Magellanic clouds can be seen.

Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the Southern Cone of western South America. It is the southernmost country in the world and the closest to Antarctica, extending along a narrow strip of land between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Chile shares borders with Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage to the south. It also administers several Pacific islands, including Juan Fernández, Isla Salas y Gómez, Desventuradas, and Easter Island, and claims about 1,250,000 square kilometers (480,000 sq mi) of Antarctica as the Chilean Antarctic Territory.

Credit: ESO/N. Schafer
Release Date: July 27, 2026

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