Moonrise at Paranal

Moonrise at Paranal. Cerro Paranal mountain is home to ESO's Paranal Observatory which hosts one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world, the VLT. The telescope is one of the most optically advanced in the world and each of the four unit telescopes consists of main mirrors measuring 8.2 meters in diameter. The 8.2-m diameter Unit Telescopes can also be used individually. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 can be obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion (four thousand million) times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.