VST enclosure at Paranal

The 2.6m diameter VLT Survey Telescope (VST) in its dome at ESO's Cerro Paranal observing site. Located in the Atacama Desert of Chile, the site is over 2600 metres above sea level and provides exceptionally dry and dark viewing conditions. The VST is equipped with a giant CCD camera called OmegaCAM to take very wide-field images of the sky in visible light. It is used to survey broad regions of the sky and catalogue huge numbers of celestial objects.