Mars near and far

This photo shows a peaceful night above ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Most striking is the bright reddish spot in the centre-left of the sky: Mars.

Silhouetted against the starry sky is ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), on the hill to the right. We can see the domes of the four 8.2-m Unit Telescopes, as well as the smaller VLT Survey Telescope at the right edge of the hill.

Speaking of Mars, did you know that the landscape around Paranal looks uncannily martian? So much so that the European Space Agency sometimes sends prototype rovers to simulate missions in a realistic environment.