April — Guiding lights to the stars and the ESO 3.6-m telescope

The ESO 3.6-m telescope sits perched at the summit of the La Silla mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, 2400 m above sea level, in this picture. A part of ESO’s La Silla Observatory, this location provides conditions ideal for stargazing, and is home to the prolific planet-hunter HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher.

At the top we see one of our neighbouring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, known as lafken, labken or künchalabken (“lagoon”) and rünanko (“water well”) in the Mapuche culture. This dwarf galaxy orbits around the Milky Way, our home galaxy.

The original image can be downloaded in high resolution on https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2346a/