European Southern Observatory Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an international astronomical organisation, composed and supported by ten countries from the European Union plus Switzerland and was created in 1962. It is famous for discovering the current farthest galaxy ever seen by humans, the Abell 1835 IR1916 galaxy. And notably the first picture of an exosolar planet; orbiting a brown dwarf 260 light-years away.
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2 Instruments at La Silla 3 Instruments at Paranal 4 External links |
Most of its observation facilities are located in Chile (hence the name "Southern"), and the headquarters are located in Garching near Munich, Germany. ESO operates two major observatories in the Atacama desert, Chile:
Facilities
One of the most ambitious ESO projects is the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL). If built, it will be the largest telescope in the world.
Member countries:
Observatories Host Country:
Instruments at La Silla
This telescope is loaned from the the Max Planck Gesellschaft. Its instrumentation includes both a spectroscope and a wide-field CCD imager capable of mapping substantial portions of the sky in a single exposure.
A conventionally designed horseshoe mount telescope, this is mostly instrumented for infrared spectroscopy.
Although the NTT is almost the same size as the 3.6m telescope, the use of active optics makes it a higher resolution instrument. Also it had, at the time of building, innovative thermal control systems to minimise the telescope and dome seeing.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is the main instrument, composed of four near-identical 8.2 m telescopes. In addition the four main telescopes can combine their light to make a fifth instrument, the VLTI, Very Large Telescope Interferometer. Four auxilliary telescopes of 1.8m each are being added to the VLTI to make it available when the main telescopes are being used for other projects. The first of these was installed in early 2004.
The site also carries 2.5m and 4m survey telescopes with wider fields of view for surveying large areas of sky uniformly. 2.2m telescope
3.6m telescope
New Technology Telescope (NTT)
Instruments at Paranal