European Southern Observatory

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 a candidate to be farthest galaxy ever seen by humans, the Abell 1835 IR1916 galaxy, though this claim seems to be debunked by a series of new articles. In 2005, it obtained the first picture of an exosolar planet, 2M1207b, orbiting a brown dwarf 260 light-years away.

Instruments at La Silla

Of the eighteen telescopes at La Silla Observatory, three are operated by ESO for use by the ESO astronomical community:

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2.2m telescope

This telescope is loaned from 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.

Related Topics:
Spectroscope - CCD

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3.6m telescope

A conventionally designed horseshoe mount telescope, this is mostly instrumented for infrared spectroscopy.

Related Topics:
Horseshoe mount - Infrared - Spectroscopy

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New Technology Telescope (NTT)

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.

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