Star trails above the VLT

The night sky above the 2600-metre-high Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert in Chile is dark and clear. So clear, that very long sequences of photos can easily be taken without a single cloud obscuring the stars as they rotate around the southern celestial pole.

The site is home to ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) array. Its four 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes dominate this image. The image also captures the apparent stellar movement. This movement, signalled by dotted trails, is illusory: the Earth, and not the stars, is rotating as time goes by.