Zdjęcie tygodnia

26 stycznia 2009: The 8.2m diameter main mirror of Antu, the first Unit Telescope of ESO's Very Large Telescope, is being cleaned using carbon dioxide snow. While the telescope enclosure is maintained extremely clean, the mirrors are exposed to the elements during the observations. Consequently, dust from the desert slowly accumulates over the surface of the mirror, making it less reflective over time. The mirror's surface is so delicate that normal cleaners used for household mirrors are not appropriate for telescopes. Observatories have developed other methods, such as this one using carbon dioxide snow. The tiny CO2 snowflakes in the white plume have a temperature of almost minus 80 degrees Celsius; when they land on the mirror, which is at room temperature, they cause minuscule 'explosions' that detach the dust grains from the surface. The dust then floats away, leaving the mirror clean. The process is nevertheless very delicate: should Alain Gilliotte, the ...

12 stycznia 2009: The Orion Nebula is arguably the finest of all nebulae within the Milky Way visible from the Northern Hemisphere. With a gaseous repository of 10,000 suns, and illuminated by a cluster of hot young stars, the clouds of Messier 42 — as it is also known — glow with fantastic colours and shapes, giving us a bird’s eye view of one of the greatest star forming nurseries in our part of the Milky Way. Messier 42 is a complex of glowing gas, mostly hydrogen but also helium, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in decreasing amounts, located 1,500 light-years away. At its very heart, we find the Trapezium, a group of four very hot stars that illuminate the nebula. They are the brightest of an extended cluster of several thousand young stars many of which lie unseen within the opaque gas and dust. Amazingly, whilst the Orion Nebula is easy to identify ...

15 grudnia 2008: The striking, large spiral galaxy NGC 1232, and its distorted companion shaped like the greek letter "theta". The pair is located roughly 60 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus (The River). Billions of stars and dark dust are caught up in this beautiful gravitational swirl. The blue spiral arms with their many young stars and star-forming regions make a striking contrast with the yellow-reddish core of older stars. This image is based on data acquired with the 1.5 m Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory in Chile, through three filters (B: 900 s, V: 400 s, R: 400 s).

8 grudnia 2008: About a year ago, ESO kindly agreed to donate a surplus van to the Colegio Hellen Keller, a school for children with visual disabilities, located in Santiago, Chile. The school was in desperate need of some form of transport as there were many children who could either not attend school at all, or had to spend the weekdays away from their family, simply because they could not make the daily journey on public transport, due to their disabilities. The initial idea was to donate one of the bus used to carry staff to Paranal. However, it became clear that this big van was not ideal for the school, especially with rising fuel prices. ESO kindly offered to donate the proceeds from the sale of the van instead, which was in excess of 4.000.000 Chilean Pesos (about 5,000 EUR). The school set up a fund to raise the rest of the ...

1 grudnia 2008: Supernova 2008bk in the spiral galaxy NGC 7793 was discovered at the end of March 2008 by amateur astronomer Berto Monard from South Africa. The galaxy is 13 million light-years away in the direction of Sculptor constellation. This supernova is a typical example of a massive star that exploded at the end of its life. But this time, the astronomers were able not only to see the explosion, but to precisely pinpoint the star that exploded, a rather rare achievement. This was made possible because the explosion site had been observed several times with the help of ESO's Very Large Telescope, the latest images having been observed only a few months before the explosion with the new HAWK-I instrument. An European team of astronomers, led by Seppo Mattila of University of Turku, Finland, then observed the explosion site again two months after the supernova's discovery, this time with the VLT's ...

25 listopada 2008: Bardzo Duży Teleskop (VLT), na wysokiej na 2600 m n.p.m. górze Cerro Paranal, w czołowej lokalizacji obserwacyjnej ESO, odbiera światło widzialne i podczerwone. Znajduje się w na chilijskiej pustyni Atakama. Wszystkie cztery główne teleskopy o średnicy 8,2 metra mogą operować indywidualnie z wielką kolekcją instrumentów i dokonały już niesamowitych odkryć naukowych. VLT oferuje także możliwość połączenia razem światła z czterech teleskopów głównych, aby pracowały jako interferometr. Interferometr Bardzo Dużego Teleskopu (VLTI), ze swoją własnym zestawem instrumentów, dostarcza obrazów o skrajnym poziomie milisekund łuku, a także interferometrii o precyzji mikrosekund łuku. Jako dodatek do 8,2-metrowych teleskopów, VLTI jest uzupełniane przez cztery teleskopy pomocnicze o średnicy 1,8 metra, które polepszają zdolności obrazowania i umożliwiają całonocne użytkowanie w całorocznej perspektywie. Kopuła przyszłego Teleskopu VLT do Przeglądów (VLT Survey Telescope) o średnicy 2,6 metra jest widoczna w centrum panoramy.

11 listopada 2008: The Carina Nebula is a large bright nebula that surrounds several clusters of stars. It contains two of the most massive and luminous stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae and HD 93129A. Located 7500 light years away, the nebula itself spans some 260 light years across, about 7 times the size of the Orion Nebula, and is shown in all its glory in this mosaic. It is based on images collected with the 1.5-m Danish telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory. Being brighter than one million Suns, Eta Carinae (the brightest star in this image) is the most luminous star known in the Galaxy, and has most likely a mass over 100 times that of the Sun. It is the closest example of a luminous blue variable, the last phase in the life of a very massive star before it explodes in a fiery supernova. Eta Carinae is ...

4 listopada 2008: M1-67 is the youngest wind-nebula around a Wolf-Rayet star, called WR124, in our Galaxy. These Wolf-Rayet stars start their lives with dozens of times the mass of our Sun, but loose most of it through a powerful wind, which is ultimately responsible for the formation of the nebula. Ten years ago, Hubble Space Telescope observations revealed a wealth of small knots and substructures inside the nebula. The same team, led by Cédric Foellmi (ESO), has now used ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to watch how these structures have evolved and what they can teach us about stellar winds, their chemistry, and how they mix with the surrounding interstellar medium, before the star will eventually blow everything away in a fiery supernova explosion. The image is based on FORS1 data obtained by the Paranal Science team with the VLT through 2 wide (B and V) and 3 narrow-band filters.

30 września 2008: A night of work for the Paranal Observatory, in the Chilean Atacama Desert. This picture, taken on 20 September, shows the incredible beauty of the night sky above the most advanced telescope in the world, ESO's Very Large Telescope. The Milky Way is clearly seen in this superb image.

22 września 2008: Zdjęcie w sztucznych barwach przedstawia wspaniałą galaktykę spiralną NGC 7424, położoną w odległości 40 milionów lat świetlnych. Zostało utworzone z obrazów uzyskanych za pomocą wielomodowego instrumentu VIMOS na teleskopie VLT w trzech różnych pasmach długości fali. Fotografia obejmuje obszar 6,5 x 7,2 kwadratowej sekundy łuku. Północ jest u góry, wschód po prawej. Więcej o tym niesamowitym obiekcie w komunikacie prasowym ESO eso0436.

21 sierpnia 2008: Colour-composite image of the globular cluster NGC 3201, obtained with the WFI instrument on the ESO/MPG 2.2-m telescope at La Silla. Globular clusters are large aggregates of stars, that can contain up to millions of stars. They are among the oldest objects observed in the Universe and were presumably formed at about the same time as the Milky Way Galaxy, in the early phase after the Big Bang. This particular globular cluster is located about 16 000 light-years away towards the Southern Vela constellation. The data were obtained as part of the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS), a public survey being carried out by ESO and member states, in preparation for the VLT First Light. The original image and astronomical data can be retrieved from the EIS Pre-Flames Survey Data Release pages, where many other nice images are also available.

14 sierpnia 2008: Centrum naszej galaktyki Drogi Mlecznej zlokalizowane jest w południowym gwiazdozbiorze Strzelca i znajduje się "tylko" 26 000 lat świetlnych od nas. Na zdjęciu wysokiej rozdzielczości jest możliwe rozróżnienie tysięcy pojedynczych gwiazd wewnątrz centralnego regionu o szerokości jednego roku świetlnego. Używając ruchu tych gwiazd do badania pola grawitacyjnego, obserwacje w trakcie minionej dekady pokazały, że w obrębie zaledwie 10 dni świetlnych w zwartym radioźródle i źródle promieniowania rentgenowskiego SgrA* (Sagittarius A) w centrum gromady gwiazd, skoncentrowana jest masa około 3 milionów mas Słońca. Oznacza to, że SgrA* jest jakby odpowiednikiem czarnej dziury, która prawdopodobnie znajduje się w centrum naszej Galaktyki. Zdjęcie to zostało uzyskane w połowie 2002 roku instrumentem NACO na 8,2-m teleskopie VLT Yepun. Jest to połączenie trzech zakresów podczerwieni pomiędzy 1,6 i 3,5 µm. Zwarte obiekty są gwiazdami a ich kolory oznaczają ich temperaturę (niebieski - "gorący", czerwony - "zimny"). Występuje również rozproszona emisja podczerwona od międzygwiezdnego pyłu pomiędzy ...

7 sierpnia 2008: Paranal, the site of the VLT, was chosen for its unique characteristics: extreme dryness, very low cloud coverage, high altitude, and distant from any source of pollution. This wide-angle shot of the Atacama desert around Paranal, which shows the VLT and, in foreground, VISTA, summarizes it all. Photo taken in November 2007.

30 lipca 2008: The "Very Large Telescope Video Collection 2008" features High Definition video material which was obtained in June 2008. For the first time, ESO distributes HD-footage of the world's most advanced ground-based observing facility and provides free access to video sequences of outstanding technical quality and beauty. The material has been edited especially for broadcast use, without commentary or music.

17 lipca 2008: The first successful movement of an ALMA antenna took place at the Operations Support Facility (OSF) on 8 July 2008. The antenna transporter "Lore", one of the two units manufactured by Scheuerle under contract by ESO and delivered recently at the OSF, has been used to move one 12-m antenna from their site erection facility to an external antenna pad for sky testing.

7 lipca 2008: Podczas gdy ALMA jest obecnie w trakcie budowy, astronomowie robią już astronomię milimetrową i submilimetrową na Chajnantor za pomocą Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). Jest to teleskop 12-metrowy nowej technologii, bazujący na prototypowej antenie ALMA i działający w lokalizacji ALMA. Ma zmodyfikowaną optykę i polepszoną dokładność powierzchni anteny oraz został zaprojektowany do wykorzystywania świetnej przezroczystości nieba, pracując na długościach fali od 0,2 do 1,4 mm. Zdjęcie jest dostępne jako oprawiony obraz w sklepie ESOshop.

1 lipca 2008: The image shows X-shooter, the first of the second generation VLT instruments, under test in the integration lab at ESO, Garching. The instrument has been built by a Consortium including ESO and institutes from Denmark, Italy, The Netherlands and France, and will start operation at the telescope in 2009. X-shooter is a single target, wide band, intermediate spectral resolution spectrograph, designed to get the full spectrum of the faintest cosmic sources from the atmospheric cutoff in the near-ultraviolet to the infrared K-band in a single exposure. In this image the instrument is shown as mounted on a telescope Cassegrain focus simulator, pointing at a large zenith distance. At the centre is the cryostat with the near-infrared arm of the spectrograph and at the left is the lower side of the visual spectrograph with its CCD detector. The two large boxes on the sides host the control electronics of the instrument.

23 czerwca 2008: The winding road connecting the ALMA Operation Support Facility at 3,000m altitude to the Array Operation Site (5,000m high) passes an area between 3500m and 3800m dominated by large cacti (Echinopsis Atacamensis). These cacti grow on average 1cm per year, and reach heights of up to 9m. Stephane Guisard recently captured the beautiful sky above this unique location in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The Milky Way is seen in all its glory, as well as, in the lower right, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

10 czerwca 2008: This aerial view of Cerro Paranal, the site of ESO's Very Large Telescope, was obtained in 1994. It shows the construction of the concrete base for the four telescope enclosures. To the left and a little lower than the rest of the platform is the excavation for the control building. The platform altitude is about 2640 metres above sea level and it measures about 150 metres across. The width of the access road is no less than 12 metres, i.e. nearly equal to that of a three-lane highway; this is necessary to ensure the safe transport of all telescope parts, especially the four 8.2-metre fragile mirrors, to the top. The summit of Paranal has been blasted away so to create the flat platform that supports the 4 Unit Telescopes, as well as the network of tunnels that transport the light from the telescopes to the interferometric laboratory. On this 1994 ...

26 maja 2008: Obracające się niebo nad Bardzo Dużym Teleskopem (VLT) w Paranal. Ekspozycja o długim czasie pokazuje gwiazdy obracające się wokół południowego (po lewej) i północnego (po prawej) bieguna niebieskiego. Równik niebieski znajduje się w środku zdjęcia, tam gdzie gwiazdy wydają się poruszać po liniach prostych. Widoczny jest także ruch kopuł VLT.