ESO from afar

The centre of the image shows an aerial view of the ESO buildings in Garching, revealing their striking architecture. The dominant design of each building is based on circles, whether they be open arcs - such as the original headquarters (upper-right), the overlapping circles of the headquarters extension (lower-left), or the cylinder of the new technical building (lower-right). Currently under construction in the upper-left of the plot is the ESO Supernova building, designed again on circles to represent the transfer of mass between stars in a binary system.