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ESO, the European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world's most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.
ESO is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy.
It carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities for astronomy to enable important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research.
ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in the Atacama Desert region of Chile:La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. ESO's first site is at La Silla, a 2400 m high mountain 600 km north of Santiago de Chile. It is equipped with several optical telescopes with mirror diameters of up to 3.6 metres.
The 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror, a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world's current large telescopes. The ESO 3.6-metre telescope is now home to the world's foremost extrasolar planet hunter: HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), a spectrograph with unrivalled precision.
While La Silla remains at the forefront of astronomy, and is still the second most scientifically productive in ground-based astronomy, the 2600 m high Paranal site with the Very Large Tele-scope array (VLT) is the flagship facility of European astronomy. Paranal is situated about 130 km south of Antofagasta in Chile, 12 km inland from the Pacific coast in one of the driest areas in the world. Scientific operations began in 1999 and have resulted in many extremely successful research programmes.
The VLT is a most unusual telescope, based on the latest technology. It is not just one, but an array of four telescopes, each with a main mirror of 8.2 metres in diameter. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 have been obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion times fainter than those seen with the naked eye.
One of the most exciting features of the VLT is the option to use it as a giant optical interferometer (VLT Interferometer or VLTI). This is done by combining the light from several of the telescopes, including one or more of four 1.8-metre moveable Auxiliary Telescopes. In this interferometric mode, the telescope has a vision as sharp as that of a telescope the size of the separation between the most distant mirrors. For the VLTI, this is 200 metres.
Each year, about 2000 proposals are made for the use of ESO telescopes, requesting between four and six times more nights than are available. ESO is the most productive ground-based observatory in the world, which annually results in many peer-reviewed publications: in 2008 alone, 700 refereed papers based on ESO data were published, making ESO the world's most productive astronomical observatory.
Adapted from Eso Org website.
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