La Silla Control room

In modern astronomy, telescopes are controlled remotely via computer, typically from a building equipped for this purpose. Here in the picture, the control room at La Silla, the first ESO observatory site, located some 160 km north from La Serena, in the IV Region of Chile. There are currently three telescopes in operation at La Silla — the New Technology Telescope (NTT), the ESO 3.6-metre telescope, with the HARPS spectrograph, and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope — as well as several national and project telescopes.