This photo is not a composite. ESO astronomer Yuri Beletsky took this of the night sky above Paranal, the 2600m high mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert home to ESO's Very Large Telescope. The image reveals not only the Milky Way, but also the planet Jupiter and the laser beam used at Yepun, one of the 8.2-m telescopes that make up this extraordinary facility.
At the time the picture was taken, astronomers were using the SINFONI instrument to study the Galactic Centre, having a close look at the supermassive black hole that lurks in there.
Some of them, such as NACO and SINFONI, make use of adaptive optics, a technique that allows astronomers to overcome the blurring effect of the atmosphere. This means that astronomers obtain images almost as good as if the whole telescope was placed in space, above Earth's atmosphere. Adaptive optics, however, requires a nearby reference star that has to be relatively bright, thereby limiting the area of the sky that can be surveyed. To surmount this limitation, astronomers now use at Paranal a powerful laser that creates an artificial star, where and when they need it.
The images were obtained with a digital camera and 10-mm optics, mounted on a small equatorial mount, and are each the result of a single 5 minute exposure.
Photo Credit:
Yuri Beletsky
ESO, Chile
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