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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.

1 Facilities

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:

The La Silla Observatory
The Paranal Observatory, which includes the Very Large Telescope.

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:

Belgium
DenmarkKongeriget Danmark ( In Detail) Motto of the Queen: Guds hjaelp, Folkets kaerlighed, Danmarks styrke (English: God's help, the love of the people, Denmark's strength) Official language Danish Capital Copenhagen Kobenhavn Monarch Margrethe II Prime Ministe
FinlandSuomen TasavaltaRepubliken Finland ( In Detail) ( In Detail) National motto: None Official languages Finnish and Swedish Capital Helsinki President Tarja Halonen Prime minister Matti Vanhanen Area Total % water Ranked 64th 337,030 km² 9. 4% Population Tot
FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents.
Germany
ItalyThe Italian Republic or Italy ( Italian: Italia is a country in the south of Europe, consisting mainly of a boot-shaped peninsula together with two large islands in the Mediterranean Sea: Sicily and Sardinia. To the north, where it borders France, Switzer
NetherlandsDutch redirects here. For other uses, see Dutch (disambiguation). The Netherlands ( Dutch: Nederland is the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, a constitutional monarchy. It is located in northwestern Europe and borders the North Sea, Belgium
PortugalRepublica Portuguesa ( In Detail) National motto: None Official language Portuguese 3 Capital Lisbon President Jorge Sampaio Prime Minister Pedro Santana Lopes Area Total % water World ranking: 109th 92,391 km²0. 5 % Population Total ( 2004) Density World
SwedenThe Kingdom of Sweden Konungariket Sverige in Swedish) is a Nordic country in Scandinavia, in Northern Europe. It is bordered by Norway on the west, Finland on the northeast, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat on the southwest, and the Baltic Sea and the Gulf
SwitzerlandThe Swiss Confederation or Switzerland is a landlocked federal state in central Europe, with neighbours Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein. The country has a strong tradition of political and military neutrality, but also of international c
United Kingdom

Observatories Host Country:

Chile

2 Instruments at La Silla

2.1 2.2m telescope

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.

2.2 3.6m telescope

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

2.3 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.

3 Instruments at Paranal

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.

4 External links

Chile Astronomical observatories

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Topics: European Southern Observatory, Facilities, Instruments At La...

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