Location of ESO’s observatories in Chile (Spanish annotations)

This view of Northern Chile, as seen from the NASA Space Shuttle during a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope (partly visible to the right), shows the Atacama Desert, where ESO’s observatories are located. Northernmost is the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), two international observatories in which ESO is a partner. ESO’s Paranal Observatory, home to ESO’s Very Large Telescope and where the future ESO Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the South site of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be located, are a few hundred km southwest of ALMA and APEX. The La Silla Observatory, ESO’s first observatory, is further south still. A few clouds are seen in this extremely dry area, due to the influence of the cold Humboldt Stream along the Chilean Pacific coast (left) and the high Andes mountains (right) that act as a barrier. Background photo courtesy ESA astronaut Claude Nicollier.