The Vitacura Guesthouse gardens

The lush gardens of the ESO Guesthouse in Vitacura — the official lodge for visiting astronomers and ESO staff travelling to ESO sites — are revealed in this image.

The astronomers and scientists involved in the exciting and innovative Pale Red Dot campaign — a scientific outreach project that will allow the public to follow a planet hunt as it happens — will stay at the Guesthouse whilst using the HARPS spectrograph, installed on ESO's 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory.

Pale Red Dot is an international search for an Earth-like exoplanet around the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri. It will use HARPS, attached to ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory, as well as the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) and the Burst Optical Observer and Transient Exploring System (BOOTES). The public will see how teams of astronomers with different specialities work together to collect, analyse and interpret data, which may or may not be able to confirm the presence of an Earth-like planet orbiting our nearest neighbour. The outreach campaign consists ofblog posts and social media updates on the Pale Red Dot Twitter account and using the hashtag#PaleRedDot. For more information visit the Pale Red Dot website: http://www.palereddot.org