Starry sky

The Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope sits under the starry sky of the Chilean Atacama Desert. This telescope was decommissioned in 2003, but remains at its home, ESO’s La Silla Observatory, where it took observations and helped astronomers to study star formation and molecular clouds for over two decades. At the time of its first light, it was the only large sub-millimetre telescope in the southern hemisphere, and today is superseded by APEX and ALMA.