Watching the sunset at Cerro Armazones

ESO Photo Ambassador Serge Brunier watches a spectacular sunset from the top of Cerro Armazones and prepares for a clear starry night. The crescent Moon is visible just above the Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM), which measures the atmospheric seeing, a fundamental parameter of the quality of the atmosphere for astronomical observations. Cerro Armazones is a 3046-metre mountain in the central part of Chile’s Atacama Desert, and is the site selected for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Armazones is some 130 kilometres south of the town of Antofagasta and about 20 kilometres from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope.