The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an international astronomical organisation, composed and supported by ten countries from the European Union and 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.

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
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Portugal
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom

Observatories Host Country:

• Chile

Instruments at the La Silla site:

2.2m telescope

This telescope is loaned from the the Max Planck Gesellshaft. It's instrumentation includes both a spectroscope and a wide-field CCD imager capable of mapping substantial portions of the sky in a single exposure.

3.6m telescope ESO_3.6m_Telescope

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

NTT New Technology Telescope

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 maximise the telescope and dome seeing.

Instruments at the Paranal site:

The VLT Very_Large_Telescope 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 auxialliary telescope 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 a 4m survey telescopes with wider fields of view for surveying large areas ofd sky uniformly.

External links

• ESO: http://www.eso.org
• Very Large Telescope
• La Silla Observatory