Paranal fish-eye time-lapse

A fulldome/fish-eye time-lapse captured during the ESO Ultra HD Expedition showing the Very Large Telescope array (VLT), the flagship facility for European ground-based astronomy. The Milky Way can be seen prominently overhead. 

To the lower right, Yepun, Unit Telescope 4 (UT4) can be seen to shine its powerful laser into the Earth's upper atmosphere, allowing astronomers to create artificial stars in a technique called adaptive optics. Adaptive optics allows the corrected optical system to observe finer details of much fainter astronomical objects than is otherwise possible from the ground.