Bild der Woche

1. Dezember 2008: Supernova 2008bk in the spiral galaxy NGC 7793 was discovered at the end of March 2008 by amateur astronomer Berto Monard from South Africa. The galaxy is 13 million light-years away in the direction of Sculptor constellation. This supernova is a typical example of a massive star that exploded at the end of its life. But this time, the astronomers were able not only to see the explosion, but to precisely pinpoint the star that exploded, a rather rare achievement. This was made possible because the explosion site had been observed several times with the help of ESO's Very Large Telescope, the latest images having been observed only a few months before the explosion with the new HAWK-I instrument. An European team of astronomers, led by Seppo Mattila of University of Turku, Finland, then observed the explosion site again two months after the supernova's discovery, this time with the VLT's ...

25. November 2008: Das Very Large Telescope (VLT) auf dem 2600 Meter hohen Cerro Paranal ist der wichtigste Standort der ESO für Beobachtungen im sichtbaren und infraroten Licht. Das Paranal Observatorium liegt in der chilenischen Atacamawüste. Die vier 8,2-Meter-Hauptteleskope des VLT können unabhängig voneinander mit einer Vielzahl von wissenschaftlichen Instrumenten betrieben werden, und haben bereits viele erstaunliche wissenschaftliche Entdeckungen ermöglicht. Ebenso bietet das VLT aber auch die Möglichkeit, das Licht der vier Hauptteleskope kohärent zu vereinigen. Dieses sogenannte Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) ist mit einer eigenen Ausstattung an Instrumenten versehen und wird eingesetzt, um nur wenige Millibogensekunden große Bilddetails zu erfassen und um Astrometrie mit einer Genauigkeit von bis zu 10 Mikrobogensekunden zu betreiben. Zusätzlich zu den vier 8,2-Meter-Teleskopen kann das VLTI auch mit den vier Hilfsteleskopen (Auxiliary Telescopes oder kurz ATs), die einen Hauptspiegeldurchmesser von 1,8 Metern haben, betrieben werden. Die ATs dienen einerseits zur Verbesserung der Abbildungsleistung des VLTI, ermöglichen ...

11. November 2008: The Carina Nebula is a large bright nebula that surrounds several clusters of stars. It contains two of the most massive and luminous stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae and HD 93129A. Located 7500 light years away, the nebula itself spans some 260 light years across, about 7 times the size of the Orion Nebula, and is shown in all its glory in this mosaic. It is based on images collected with the 1.5-m Danish telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory. Being brighter than one million Suns, Eta Carinae (the brightest star in this image) is the most luminous star known in the Galaxy, and has most likely a mass over 100 times that of the Sun. It is the closest example of a luminous blue variable, the last phase in the life of a very massive star before it explodes in a fiery supernova. Eta Carinae is ...

4. November 2008: M1-67 is the youngest wind-nebula around a Wolf-Rayet star, called WR124, in our Galaxy. These Wolf-Rayet stars start their lives with dozens of times the mass of our Sun, but loose most of it through a powerful wind, which is ultimately responsible for the formation of the nebula. Ten years ago, Hubble Space Telescope observations revealed a wealth of small knots and substructures inside the nebula. The same team, led by Cédric Foellmi (ESO), has now used ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to watch how these structures have evolved and what they can teach us about stellar winds, their chemistry, and how they mix with the surrounding interstellar medium, before the star will eventually blow everything away in a fiery supernova explosion. The image is based on FORS1 data obtained by the Paranal Science team with the VLT through 2 wide (B and V) and 3 narrow-band filters.

30. September 2008: A night of work for the Paranal Observatory, in the Chilean Atacama Desert. This picture, taken on 20 September, shows the incredible beauty of the night sky above the most advanced telescope in the world, ESO's Very Large Telescope. The Milky Way is clearly seen in this superb image.

22. September 2008: Composite colour-coded image of another magnificent spiral galaxy, NGC 7424, at a distance of 40 million light-years. It is based on images obtained with the multi-mode VIMOS instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in three different wavelength bands. The image covers 6.5 x 7.2 square arcminutes on the sky. North is up and East is to the right. Read more about this superb object in the ESO Press Release eso0436.

21. August 2008: Farbkomposit des Kugelsternhaufens NGC 3201, aufgenommen mit dem WFI-Instrument am ESO/MPG 2,2-Meter-Teleskop auf La Silla. Kugelsternhaufen sind große Ansammlungen von Sternen, die bis zu Millionen von Sternen enthalten können. Sie gehören zu den ältesten im Universum beobachteten Objekten und wurden vermutlich etwa zur gleichen Zeit wie die Milchstraße gebildet: bereits in den frühen Phasen nach dem Urknall. Dieser besondere Kugelsternhaufen befindet sich etwa 16.000 Lichtjahre entfernt in Richtung des südlichen Sternbilds Vela. Die Daten wurden im Rahmen der ESO Imaging Survey (EIS) aufgenommen, einer öffentlichen Durchmusterung, die von der ESO und ihren Mitgliedsländern in Vorbereitung auf das Erste Licht des VLT durchgeführt wurde. Das Originalbild und die astronomischen Daten können auf den Webseiten des EIS Pre-Flames Survey abgerufen werden, wo auch viele andere schöne Bilder zur Verfügung stehen.

14. August 2008: The centre of our Milky Way galaxy is located in the southern constellation Sagittarius (The Archer) and is "only" 26,000 light-years away. On high-resolution images, it is possible to discern thousands of individual stars within the central, one light-year wide region. Using the motions of these stars to probe the gravitational field, observations over the last decade have shown that a mass of about 3 million times that of the Sun is concentrated within a radius of only 10 light-days of the compact radio and X-ray source SgrA* (Sagittarius A) at the centre of the star cluster. This means that SgrA* is the most likely counterpart of the black hole believed to exist at the centre of our Galaxy. This image was obtained in mid-2002 with the NACO instrument at the 8.2-m VLT Yepun telescope. It combines frames in three infrared wavebands between 1.6 and 3.5 µm. The compact objects ...

7. August 2008: Paranal, the site of the VLT, was chosen for its unique characteristics: extreme dryness, very low cloud coverage, high altitude, and distant from any source of pollution. This wide-angle shot of the Atacama desert around Paranal, which shows the VLT and, in foreground, VISTA, summarizes it all. Photo taken in November 2007.

30. Juli 2008: The "Very Large Telescope Video Collection 2008" features High Definition video material which was obtained in June 2008. For the first time, ESO distributes HD-footage of the world's most advanced ground-based observing facility and provides free access to video sequences of outstanding technical quality and beauty. The material has been edited especially for broadcast use, without commentary or music.

17. Juli 2008: The first successful movement of an ALMA antenna took place at the Operations Support Facility (OSF) on 8 July 2008. The antenna transporter "Lore", one of the two units manufactured by Scheuerle under contract by ESO and delivered recently at the OSF, has been used to move one 12-m antenna from their site erection facility to an external antenna pad for sky testing.

7. Juli 2008: Während sich ALMA noch im Bau befindet, führen die Astronomen auf dem Chajnantor-Plateau mit dem Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) bereits Millimeter- und Submillimeter-Beobachtungen durch. Dabei handelt es sich um ein 12-Meter-Teleskop neuerer Bauweise, das auf einem Prototypen einer ALMA-Antennenschüssel basiert und am ALMA-Standort betrieben wird. Seine Optik wirde modifiziert und die Oberflächengenauigkeit der Schüssel wurde verbessert. APEX wurde so konstruiert, das es die Vorteile der hervorragenden Durchsicht des Himmels im Wellenlängenbereich von 0,2 bis 1,4 Millimetern bestmöglich ausnutzen kann. Dieses Bild ist aufgezogen im ESOshop erhältlich.

1. Juli 2008: The image shows X-shooter, the first of the second generation VLT instruments, under test in the integration lab at ESO, Garching. The instrument has been built by a Consortium including ESO and institutes from Denmark, Italy, The Netherlands and France, and will start operation at the telescope in 2009. X-shooter is a single target, wide band, intermediate spectral resolution spectrograph, designed to get the full spectrum of the faintest cosmic sources from the atmospheric cutoff in the near-ultraviolet to the infrared K-band in a single exposure. In this image the instrument is shown as mounted on a telescope Cassegrain focus simulator, pointing at a large zenith distance. At the centre is the cryostat with the near-infrared arm of the spectrograph and at the left is the lower side of the visual spectrograph with its CCD detector. The two large boxes on the sides host the control electronics of the instrument.

23. Juni 2008: The winding road connecting the ALMA Operation Support Facility at 3,000m altitude to the Array Operation Site (5,000m high) passes an area between 3500m and 3800m dominated by large cacti (Echinopsis Atacamensis). These cacti grow on average 1cm per year, and reach heights of up to 9m. Stephane Guisard recently captured the beautiful sky above this unique location in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The Milky Way is seen in all its glory, as well as, in the lower right, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

10. Juni 2008: This aerial view of Cerro Paranal, the site of ESO's Very Large Telescope, was obtained in 1994. It shows the construction of the concrete base for the four telescope enclosures. To the left and a little lower than the rest of the platform is the excavation for the control building. The platform altitude is about 2640 metres above sea level and it measures about 150 metres across. The width of the access road is no less than 12 metres, i.e. nearly equal to that of a three-lane highway; this is necessary to ensure the safe transport of all telescope parts, especially the four 8.2-metre fragile mirrors, to the top. The summit of Paranal has been blasted away so to create the flat platform that supports the 4 Unit Telescopes, as well as the network of tunnels that transport the light from the telescopes to the interferometric laboratory. On this 1994 ...

26. Mai 2008: Die Drehung des Himmels über dem Very Large Telescope der ESO auf dem Paranal. Diese Langzeitbelichtungsaufnahme zeigt, wie sich die Sterne um den südlichen (links) und nördlichen (rechts) Himmelspol drehen. Der Himmelsäquator, entlang dessen die Sterne sich auf einer geraden Linie bewegen, liegt in der Mitte des Bildes. Die Bewegung der Schutzbauten der VLT-Teleskope während der Aufnahme wird als Schatten ebenfalls sichtbar.

13. Mai 2008: Heavyweights at 4,000 metre altitude: this photo shows the two ALMA antenna transporters during the final phase of the acceptance testing in April on the road between the ALMA OSF at 2,900 metre altitude and the AOS at 5,000 metres. The first transporter ("Otto") is travelling unloaded, while the second one ("Lore") is carrying the 115-tonne antenna dummy.

4. Mai 2008: An image of the planet Uranus (located 20 Astronomical units from Earth) obtained at the Very Large Telescope Observatory using the Adaptive Optics system NAOS and the near-infrared imager CONICA to capture high-contrast images of the giant planet and its system of satellites and rings during its 2008 equinox. Every 42 years, the ring (and satellites) plane of Uranus crosses the Sun, providing us with a unique opportunity to observe the rings while they present their edge to us. Ring plane crossing also allow us to observe the rings form their dark side (i.e. while the Sun is illuminating them from the opposite side), so one can search for faint satellites, faint rings, or faint ring structures, which could not be seen otherwise. Ring Plane Crossings are also an excellent opportunity to observe mutual events between satellites such as eclipse or occultation phenomena. The image above corresponds to a one ...

20. März 2008: The 8.2-m primary mirror of Yepun, Unit Telescope 4 of ESO's Very Large Telescope, after its recoating in early March

11. März 2008: The central region of the Orion Nebula (M42, NGC 1976) as seen in the near-infrared by the High Acuity Wide field K-band Imager (HAWK-I) instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal.