Ugens billede

30. maj 2011: This is a helicopter view of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Operations Support Facility (OSF) site. In the foreground is the AEM Consortium’s [1] facility where the European antennas are assembled and tested. Seven of the 25 European antennas can be seen, pointing towards the sky. More parts, including a receiver cabin and antenna base, await the next assembly. Each antenna has a dish 12 metres in diameter, and weighs about 95 tonnes. Once an antenna is assembled and ready, it is handed over to the ALMA project and moved to the nearby OSF technical area, which is the area in the background, where more antennas can be seen. Here, it is integrated into the rest of the observatory’s systems. Finally, after further tests by the ALMA team, it is moved from the 2900 metres high OSF to its workplace, the Array Operation Site (AOS), located at an altitude ...

23. maj 2011: The first of twelve 7-metre antennas has been handed over to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile. ALMA will have an array of fifty antennas with 12-metre diameter dishes, as well as a system known as the Atacama Compact Array (ACA), provided by Japan, of which this new 7-metre antenna is part. The ACA will have a total of twelve 7-metre dishes and four 12-metre dishes, and will be particularly important for ALMA’s observations of the broader structure in extended astronomical objects such as giant clouds of molecular gas. The 7-metre antenna is seen here at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), at an altitude of 2900 metres in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. These antennas are being provided by Japan through a contract with MELCO (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation). The antennas are manufactured in Japan, then disassembled and shipped to Chile. They are reassembled and tested ...

16. maj 2011: This new image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3244 was taken with the help of the President of Czechia, Václav Klaus, during his visit to ESO’s Paranal Observatory [1], on the night of 6 April 2011. Czechia joined ESO in 2007, and this was the first visit of the country’s President to an ESO site. This galaxy has attracted considerable interest from astronomers over the past nine months, thanks to the violent death of one of its stars, which was discovered on 27 June 2010. This supernova explosion, now known as Supernova 2010ev (SN 2010ev), is still visible as the — now faint — blue dot nestled within one of the thick spiral arms just to the left of the galaxy’s nucleus. To the right of the galaxy, an unremarkable foreground star in our own Milky Way, TYC 7713-527-1, shines brightly enough to catch our attention. Although the star seems ...

9. maj 2011: En total måneformørkelse er et imponerende skue.Men det giver også en anden mulighed: En mørk, måneskins-fri stjernehimmel.Cerro Paranal i den chilenske Atacama-ørkenen er et af de mestafsidesliggende steder i verden, afstanden fra kilderne til lysforurening gørnattehimlen desto mere bemærkelsesværdigt i løbet af en total måneformørkelse.Dette panorama foto, taget af ESO fotoambassadør Yuri Beletsky, viserstjernehimlen set fra, ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) påCerro Paranal under måneformørkelsen den 21. december 2010.Den rødlige skive af Månen ses til højre i billedet, mens Mælkevejen buerover himlen i al sin skønhed.En anden svag glød af lys ses også, det er lys der omgiver den lysstærke planet Venus i nederste venstre hjørne af billedet.Dette fænomen, kendt som zodiakallys, fremkommer når lyset fra solen reflekteres i støv i planeternes baneplan.Det er så svagt, at det normalt er skjult af måneskin eller lysforurening.Under en total måneformørkelse, blokerer jordens skygge for solens direkte lys på Månen.Månen er stadig synligt, ...

2. maj 2011: ESO Photo Ambassador Gerhard Hüdepohl has captured yet another rare sight. Yesterday, in the morning of 1 May 2011, about an hour before sunrise, five of our Solar System’s eight planets and the Moon could be seen from Paranal. The four planets in the sky were Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, and they were joined by the crescent Moon to create this wonderful photo opportunity of a planetary conjunction — two or more celestial bodies seen near each other in the sky, usually from the Earth. In this photo, the bright crescent of the Moon is illuminated by the Sun (which is just below the horizon), while the darker part receives only light reflected from the surface of the Earth. Venus is the highest and brightest planet, with Mercury below and to the right. Jupiter is directly below Venus, but much closer to the horizon. Mars can be seen just ...

25. april 2011: On Cerro Paranal, the 2600-metre-high mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is home to ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the atmospheric conditions are so exceptional that fleeting events such as the green flash of the setting Sun are seen relatively frequently. Now, however, ESO Photo Ambassador Gerhard Hüdepohl has captured an even rarer sight: a green flash from the Moon, instead of the Sun. The photographs are very probably the best ever taken of the Moon’s green flash. Gerhard was surprised and delighted to catch the stunning green flash in this series of photographs of the setting full Moon crossing the horizon, taken on a clear early morning from the Paranal Residencia. The Earth’s atmosphere bends, or refracts, light — rather like a giant prism. The effect is greater in the lower denser layers of the atmosphere, so rays of light from the Sun or Moon are curved slightly downwards. Shorter ...

18. april 2011: Some places on Earth can seem like alien environments, as this stunning 360 degree panorama shows. It is not the strange surface of an exoplanet, but rather the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. This unearthly location is home to ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. Chajnantor was chosen because the rarefied atmosphere above this very high site is so dry that, unlike at most other places on Earth, it is largely transparent to the wavelengths of light that ALMA is designed to detect. At the centre of the image, the darker, rounded shape of the peak of Cerro Chajnantor, 5600 metres high, can be spotted, followed slightly to the left in the far distance by the conical shape of the 5930-metre Licancabur volcano. The flat area in front, at an altitude of 5000 metres, is the Chajnantor Plateau, the ALMA Array Operations Site. Here the 66 ALMA antennas can ...

11. april 2011: Dette panoramafotografi viser det Europæiske Syd Observatoriums hovedkvarter i Garching ved München, Tyskland.Billedet viser udsigten fra taget af hovedbygningen lige efter solnedgang.Dette er det videnskabelige, tekniske og administrative center for ESO drift, og den base, hvorfra mange astronomer udfører deres forskning.De forskere, teknikere og administratorer, der arbejder her kommer fra mange forskellige baggrunde, men alle har én ting til fælles: en passion for astronomi. ESO er den mest fremtrædende internationale astronomi-organisation i Europa og verdens mest produktive astronomiske observatorium.ESO driver teleskoper på tre observatorier i Chile: La Silla, Paranal og Chajnantor.Derudover er Cerro Armazones, nær Paranal blevet valgt som stedet for European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).ESO leverer state-of-the-art forskningsfaciliteter til astronomer og er medlemstaterne er Østrig, Belgien, Brasilien, Tjekkiet, Danmark, Finland, Frankrig, Tyskland, Italien, Nederlandene, Portugal, Spanien, Sverige, Schweiz og Storbritannien.ESO hovedkvarter afspejler denne multikulturelle ånd af samarbejde og er arbejdsplads for astronomer fra hele verden.Billedet kan købes som monteret ...

4. april 2011: Deep in the Chilean Atacama Desert, far from sources of light pollution and other people-related disturbances, there is a tranquil sky like few others on Earth. This is the site for the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, a scientific machine at the cutting-edge of technology. In this panoramic photograph, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — satellite galaxies of our own — glow brightly on the left, while the VLT’s Unit Telescope 1 stands vigil on the right. Appearing to bridge the gap between them is the Milky Way, the plane of our own galaxy. The seemingly countless stars give a sense of the true scale of the cosmos. Every night ESO astronomers rise to the challenge of studying this vista to make sense of the Universe. This awe-inspiring image was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky. Born in Belarus, Yuri now lives in Chile where he works ...

28. marts 2011: Når de er færdige, vil antennerne der udgør Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) blive spredt over Chajnantor-plateauet i de chileanske Andesbjerge over indbyrdes afstande på op til 16 kilometer, men de vil arbejde sammen for at danne det såkaldte interferometer .På den måde vil ALMA være kraftigere end summen af dens dele,og optræde som et enkelt gigantisk teleskop, der er så stort som hele samlingen af antenner.De 66 ALMA antenner er ikke alle ens.En hovedgruppe af halvtreds antenner med 12-meter paraboler vil blive suppleret af Atacama Compact Array (ACA) med tolv mindre 7-meter paraboler og fire yderligere 12-meter paraboler.ACA-parabolerne bliver konstrueret af Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (MELCO).Tre af dem er vist på dette billede af MELCO Site Erection Facility på ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF) site.OSF ligger i en højde på 2900 meter, hvorfra de færdige parabolantenner transporteres langs en 28 km vej til 5000 meters højde på Chajnantor ...

21. marts 2011: The night of 19 March saw an unusual coincidence of astronomical events: the full Moon occurred at almost exactly the same time as the Moon was closest to Earth in its elliptical orbit (the point called perigee). The combination of the Moon being both full and relatively close to the Earth made it look significantly bigger and brighter than usual. This panoramic photograph, taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Gerd Hüdepohl, captures this so-called "supermoon" as seen from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).On the right, in the east, the Moon rises over the mountains, while the setting Sun is visible on the left of the panorama, sinking in the west below the clouds over the Pacific Ocean. Its last rays illuminate the four giant VLT Unit Telescope buildings, the smaller VLT Survey Telescope building, the four round VLT Auxiliary Telescope enclosures, and the Paranal staff who have ...

14. marts 2011: The number of antennas for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on the Chajnantor plateau has now reached double digits! The tenth antenna was moved up from the Operations Support Facility at an altitude of 2900 metres to the Array Operations Site at 5000 metres, high in the Chilean Andes, on 4 March 2011 using one of the ALMA transporter vehicles. ALMA is a telescope designed to observe millimetre- and submillimetre-wavelength light with its array of antenna dishes. Using a technique called interferometry, ALMA acts like a single giant telescope as large as the whole set of antennas. Thanks to the transporter vehicles, the antennas can be arranged in different configurations, where the maximum separation between them varies from 150 metres to 16 kilometres. The distant viewpoint of this photograph is necessary for one to see all ten of the antennas in a single shot. Nine of them, including the ...

7. marts 2011: The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) antennas may look rooted to the ground in this striking image — taken at the Array Operations Site on the Chajnantor plateau, at an altitude of 5000 metres — but these dishes are surprisingly mobile. Thanks to the two antenna transporter vehicles, the antennas in the array — which will consist of a total of 66 dishes when construction is complete — can be repositioned to meet the needs of a particular observation project. The transporters, named Otto and Lore, were specially designed to transport the hefty 115-tonne antennas and position them precisely on concrete foundation pads, spread across the plateau over distances of up to 16 kilometres. Here, four antennas have been placed on closely spaced pads for testing during the Commissioning and Science Verification phase of ALMA construction. The transporter vehicles drive on 28 tyres, with two 700-HP (500 kW) diesel engines ...

28. februar 2011: ALMA antennas stand side by side, built strong to withstand the unforgiving environment of the Chajnantor plateau, high in the Chilean Andes. At an altitude of 5000 m, the ALMA dishes — a total of 66 when construction is completed — will face strong winds and harsh sunlight, all without the safe haven of a protective dome. The temperature can vary by 40 degrees Celsius, dipping well below freezing and occasionally allowing snow to fall, as can be seen dusting the landscape in the background of this photograph. The ALMA project is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ESO is the European partner in ALMA. This photograph was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador José Francisco Salgado. Links ESO Photo Ambassadors webpage.

21. februar 2011: Fire antenner i Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) stirrer op på den stjerne-fyldte nattehimmel, i forventning om det arbejde, der ligger forude.Månen oplyser scenen fra højre, mens Mælkevejens bånd af stjerner strækker sig øverst mod venstre.ALMA er bygget i en højde af 5000 m på Chajnantor plateau i Atacama-ørkenen i Chile.Dette er et af de tørreste steder på Jorden, og denne tørhed, kombineret med den tynde atmosfære i stor højde, giver fremragende betingelser for at observere Universet i millimeter og submillimeter bølgelængdeområdet.Ved disse lange bølgelængder, kan astronomerne måle på, for eksempel molekylære skyer, som er tætte områder af gas og støv, hvor nye stjerner bliver født, når en sky kollapser under sin egen tyngdekraft.I øjeblikket er universet relativt uudforsket ved submillimeter bølgelængder, så astronomerne forventer at afdække mange nye hemmeligheder om stjernedannelse, samt oprindelsen af ​​galakser og planeter, når ALMA er i drift.ALMA-projektet er et partnerskab mellem Europa, ...

14. februar 2011: This rich scattering of galaxies was captured using the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The thousands of galaxies contained in this small area of sky give a glimpse into the Universe’s distant past, whilst also acting as a powerful reminder of the immense scale of the cosmos. This image was taken as part of the COMBO-17 project (Classifying Objects by Medium-Band Observations in 17 Filters), in which detailed surveys of five small patches of sky were made through 17 different coloured filters. The area of sky covered by each of the five regions is about the same area as that covered by the full Moon. The survey has produced a remarkable haul of celestial specimens. For example, across just three of these regions over 25 000 galaxies have been identified. Just below the bright stars in the centre of ...

7. februar 2011: The HAWK-I instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile has been used to great effect in producing this distinctive image of the distant galaxy NGC 157. Boasting a central sweep of stars resembling a giant "S", reminiscent of the comic book hero Superman’s symbol, this celestial spiral is indeed a super example of how new technology is helping us to learn more about the cosmos. HAWK-I stands for High-Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager, and it is one of the latest and most powerful instruments on the VLT. It detects infrared light, allowing us to peer through the gas and dust that normally obscures our view. This reveals an otherwise hidden view of the Universe, and gives astronomers the opportunity to study dense areas of star formation. Learning more about star formation is an important step towards expanding our understanding of our own origins. The same ...

31. januar 2011: What looks like a barren and inhospitable alien landscape in this 360-degree panorama is in fact the site for ESO’s European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT for short. When construction begins the uninhabited mountaintop left of the centre will become a hive of activity as engineers, technicians and scientists work on building the world’s biggest eye on the sky. In many ways Chile’s Cerro Armazones may seem like an alien world. The environment is harsh, with low humidity and air pressure, a blazing Sun during the day, but breathtaking skies at night. Cerro Armazones is in the Atacama Desert — one of the driest places on Earth. These conditions, combined with its remoteness, are what make the region such an excellent location for telescopes. Armazones is an isolated peak, 3046 metres above sea level. It is about 20 km away from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO's famous Very Large Telescope. ...

24. januar 2011: As the Sun sets over Cerro Armazones, plans are well advanced for building the world's biggest “eye on the sky”: ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). With a primary mirror 39 metres in diameter, the E-ELT will dwarf all existing visible-light telescopes. Site selection has been a vital part of the plans for the E-ELT. Over the course of several years a team of experts investigated locations around the world, looking for the best place to host such an ambitious project. The site for the E-ELT must be remote enough not to be influenced by problems such as light pollution, but also needs the necessary infrastructure for the construction and operation of the observatory, and to accommodate the over 150 staff who will eventually work there. Monitoring stations, such as the one shown here, were set up to test site conditions scientifically by measuring parameters that included atmospheric turbulence and ...

17. januar 2011: Like the bow of a ship sailing a rolling ocean of red hills, the southeast corner of the observing platform at Paranal stands over the Mars-like landscape of the Chilean Atacama Desert. This panorama shows the breathtaking view of the horizon, and conveys the feeling of immensity experienced when looking from the top of Cerro Paranal, a remote 2600-metre-high mountain located in one of the driest regions on Earth. Atop Cerro Paranal is the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), the world’s most advanced optical and near infrared ground-based astronomical facility, composed of four 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes (UTs) and four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs). The fourth Unit Telescope (UT4), named Yepun in the Mapuche language, is most prominent in this photograph, while UT3 (Melipal) and UT1 (Antu) are just visible on the right-hand edge of the picture. Three of the smaller ATs can also be seen on the 200-metre-wide observing platform. ...