Kaleido-scope

The four Unit Telescopes (UT) of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) are pictured in this fisheye lens photo of the Paranal observatory. Paranal has about 300 clear nights per year, offering excellent viewing conditions for astronomers to study the sky. Not only do the clear skies make many more stars and other astronomical objects visible, they also make other light effects due to interference in the Earth's atmosphere more noticeable, creating kaleidoscopic pictures like this one. The laser is sent up by UT4 (Yepun) of the VLT, and is part of the Adaptive Optics system, state-of-the-art technology that corrects the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere to create sharper images.