APEX and Chajnantor

APEX telescope and the Chajnantor plateau. APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment, is a collaboration between Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR), Onsala Space Observatory (OSO), and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). APEX is designed to study warm and cold dust in starforming regions both in the Milky Way and in distant galaxies. Issues like the vast scales of the structure of the Universe down to the physics and chemistry of comets will be addressed. This image was obtained in March 2009.