Almost touching

This Picture of the Week shows a beautiful meeting between the Swedish–ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST) and the Milky Way, apparently almost touching each other. This shot was taken at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, located on the outskirts of the Chilean Atacama Desert, at an altitude of 2400 metres.

Light and darkness shape the Milky Way as it stretches across the night sky. The dark patches are dust clouds blocking the light behind them, coming from millions of stars in the central region of our galaxy.

SEST was built on behalf of the Swedish Natural Science Research Council (NFR) and ESO in 1987. It is a 15-m radio telescope, and it was the only large sub-millimetre telescope in the southern hemisphere at the time of first light. In 2003, the telescope was decommissioned as it was superseded by the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope (APEX) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) further north in Chile. Over the years SEST has observed a wide range of astronomical objects, from comets to stellar nurseries and galaxies.