La Silla’s Great Dane

This week’s featured image highlights a handful of the telescopes residing at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in northern Chile. The star of the show, framed perfectly by the beautiful arch of the Milky Way, sits directly in the middle of the photograph — the Danish 1.54-metre telescope.

Operational since 1979, this trusty telescope has helped astronomers to make all kinds of cosmic discoveries, from understanding more about violently merging neutron stars to detecting planets around other stars. It now performs follow-up observations of gamma-ray bursts, some of the most energetic events in the Universe.

This image, taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek, shows the heart of the Milky Way, both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the constellations of Orion (The Hunter) and the Southern Cross, and the glare of distant settlements, all of which create vibrant bursts and flashes of colour across the frame. Towards the distant horizon, hues of red and green light up the sky — these colours are produced by a phenomenon called airglow.