Telescopes and Instrumentation

As set out in its convention, ESO provides state of the art facilities for Europe’s astronomers and promotes and organises cooperation in astronomical research. Today, ESO operates some of the world’s largest and most advanced observational facilities at three sites in Northern Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. These are the best locations known in the southern hemisphere for astronomical obser-vations. With other activities such as technology development, conferences and educational projects, ESO also plays a decisive role in forming a European Research Area for astronomy and astrophysics.

Paranal Observatory Instrumentation

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal is ESO's premier site for observations in the visible and infrared light. All four unit telescopes of 8.2m diameter are individually in operation with a large collection of instruments.

The VLT offers also the possibility of combining coherently the light from the four UTs to work as an interferometer. The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), with its own suite of instruments, ultimately providing imagery at the milli arcsecond level as well as astrometry at 10 micro arcsecond precision. In addition to the 8.2m diamter telescopes the VLTI is complemented with four Auxiliary Telescopes (AT) of 1.8m diameter to improve its imaging capabilities and enable full nighttime use on a year-round basis.

Two telescopes for imaging surveys are also under construction for Paranal, the VLT Survey Telescope (VST, 2.6m diameter) for the visible, and the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA, 4m).

See the VLT on Google Maps and with pictures from the public.

La Silla Observatory Instrumentation

ESO operates three major telescopes (3.6m telescope, New Technology Telescope (NTT), 2.2m Max-Planck-ESO telescope) at the La Silla Observatory. They are equipped with state of the art instruments either built completely by ESO or by external consortia, with substantial contribution by ESO.

See La Silla on Google Maps and with pictures from the public.

APEX

APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment, is a collaboration between Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) at 50%, Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) at 23%, and the European Organisation for Astronomical Reseach in the Southern Hemiphere (ESO) at 27% to construct and operate a modified ALMA prototype antenna as a single dish on the 5100 m high site of Llano Chajnantor. The telescope was supplied by VERTEX Antennentechnik in Duisburg, Germany. APEX has a suite of heterodyne spectrometers and wide-field bolometer cameras operating in most of the atmospheric windows from 0.2 to 1.4 mm.

See the Chajnantor site in Google Maps with images from the public.