Astronomer silhouette and La Silla sunset

ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut meditates on the La Silla observatory at sunset, smoking his iconic pipe. La Silla was ESO's first observatory and is home for the 3.6-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT).

The NTT broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror (known as active optics), a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world's large telescopes.