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6 March 1996: With the help of a new and more sensitive receiver, recently installed on the 15-metre Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST) at the European Southern Observatory on the La Silla mountain in Chile, a team of European astronomers [1] has succeeded in discovering the first extra-galactic silicon-monoxide (SiO) maser . It is located in the atmosphere of the largest known star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. This observational feat now opens new, exciting possibilities for the study of individual stars in other galaxies in the Local Group. The continued search for extra-galactic SiO masers is a joint project of European and Australian astronomers, to be carried on with even more advanced instruments that will become available in the near future.

9 February 1996: This false-colour image of Comet Hale-Bopp is the first to be obtained with a major astronomical telescope after the recent conjunction with the Sun. At the time of this observation, the comet was located in the southern constellation of Sagittarius, and only 32 degrees from the Sun.

5 January 1996: A few months ago, Periodic Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 underwent a dramatic and completely unexpected, thousand-fold brightening. At that time, the cause for this interesting event was unknown. However, observations with the two largest ESO telescopes have now shown that the "dirty snowball" nucleus of this comet has recently split into at least four individual pieces. There is little doubt that the outburst and the splitting event(s) are closely related and that the greatly increased dust and gas production is due to "fresh" material of the icy cometary nucleus becoming exposed to the surrounding space for the first time.

20 November 1995: New observations of the spectrum of the rapidly spinning neutron star (the `pulsar') in the Crab Nebula have been carried out with the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) by a group of Italian astronomers [1]. Because of greatly improved spectral resolution which allows to register even very fine details in the pulsar's spectrum, they are able to determine for the first time with high accuracy the overall dependance of the emission on wavelength, i.e. the 'shape' of the spectrum. Quite unexpectedly, they also detect a hitherto unknown 100 A (10 nm) broad 'absorption dip', which can be securely attributed to the pulsar. These results open an exciting new window for the study of the extreme physical processes close to a pulsar.

23 October 1995: Astronomers from the University of Leiden have discovered an extremely distant, enormous gas cloud. It is probably a 'cocoon' from which one or more galaxies are in the process of being born, soon after the Big Bang. The observations also indicate that this gas cloud is slowly rotating, an entirely new result of great cosmological significance. The discovery was made with the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla in Chile by a team consisting of Rob van Ojik, Huub Röttgering, Chris Carilli, George Miley and Malcolm Bremer from Leiden Observatory (The Netherlands) and Duccio Macchetto of the European Space Agency (ESA) stationed in Baltimore, U.S.A. Their extensive observations are reported in an article accepted for publication in the professional European journal `Astronomy and Astrophysics' and also as a chapter of van Ojik's Ph.D. thesis which is defended at the University of Leiden on October 25. This exciting result casts new light on one of the most important questions of modern cosmology, i.e. how lumpy galaxies were 'born' out of the extremely smooth fireball produced during the Big Bang.

15 September 1995: Four European astronomers [1] have taken advantage of the superb imaging quality of the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla observatory, to detect a galaxy at an extremely large distance. They conclude that its redshift [2] is z = 4.4; thus, this galaxy is by far the most remote ever detected. In fact, it has taken its light about 90 percent of the age of the Universe to reach us, and we now observe this early object as it appeared, only 1 - 2 billion years [3] after the Universe was created in the Big Bang. Still, the galaxy contains a considerable amount of elements that must have been produced in stars. This proves that stars were formed in normal galaxies, already before this very early epoch.

25 August 1995: In the evening of August 17, 1995, famous comet hunter William Bradfield (Australia) discovered his seventeenth comet. He found the comet as a 6th magnitude object with a tail longer than 1 degree in the southern constellation Crater. Soon thereafter, observations were made at the ESO La Silla Observatory with various telescopes.

21 August 1995: Observations of Comet 1995 Q1 (Bradfield) were again made at La Silla last night (20 - 21 August 1995), but were hindered by high winds and the fact that the comet is rapidly approaching the Sun.

20 August 1995: The observations of the bright comet 1995 Q1, now named after its discoverer, William Bradfield, continued for the third night in a row at La Silla (19 - 20 August 1995). Two telescopes were employed to obtain more unique data of this interesting object.

17 August 1995: A few months ago, a violent stellar explosion – a supernova – was discovered in an extremely distant galaxy by an international team of astronomers [1]. This is the very promising first result of a recently initiated, dedicated search for such objects. Subsequent spectral observations have shown this to be the most distant supernova ever observed. Although it is very faint, it has been possible to classify it as a supernova of Type Ia, a kind that is particularly well suited for cosmological distance determinations.

23 November 1994: A group of astronomers from the Aarhus University (Denmark) and the European Southern Observatory [2] have for the first time succeeded in detecting solar-type oscillations in another star. They observed the temperature of the bright northern star Eta Bootis during six nights with the 2.5-metre Nordic Optical Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory on the island of La Palma (Canary Islands) and were able to show that it varies periodically by a few hundredths of a degree. These changes are caused by pressure waves in the star and are directly dependent on its inner structure. A detailed analysis by the astronomers has shown that the observed effects are in good agreement with current stellar models. This is a most important, independent test of stellar theory.

31 October 1994: This photo shows the faint image (arrow) of a new transneptunian object, discovered with the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope in October 1994. It is here seen in a negative reproduction (dark stars on white sky) of the CCD frame on which it was first noticed.

15 April 1994: Very difficult and time-consuming observations performed with the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) in November 1993 by an international team of astronomers [1], indicate that up to 90 percent of the matter in a distant giant galaxy maybe of a kind that cannot be seen by normal telescopes.

27 January 1994: On 23 February 1994, it will be exactly seven years since the explosion of Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud [1] was first observed, at a distance of approx. 160,000 light-years. It was the first naked-eye supernova to be seen in almost four hundred years. Few events in modern astronomy have met with such an enthusiastic response by the scientists and this famous object has been under constant surveillance ever since. After several years of relative quiescence, things are now beginning to happen in the immediate neighbourhood of SN 1987A. Recent observations with the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope (NTT) indicate that interaction between the stellar material which was ejected during the explosion and the surrounding ring-shaped nebulae has started. This signals the beginning of a more active phase during which the supernova is likely to display a number of new and interesting phenomena, never before observed.

13 August 1992: Italian astronomers, working from the Astronomical Observatory in Trieste, have performed remote observations with the ESO 3.5 metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla, Chile. This is the first time ever that such observations have been made directly from an astronomical institute in one of the ESO member countries. Quite unexpectedly, a "cosmic mirage", that is a gravitational lens in a distant cluster of galaxies, was found during these observations.

24 September 1991: Observations with the 3.5-m ESO New Technology Telescope by a European group of astronomers have shown that a very compact object in an extraordinary binary star, known under the astronomical designation 88433, is most probably a neutron star and not a black hole, as previously believed by most scientists. Improved observation techniques have allowed a reliable determination of the mass of this object: it is now found to weigh less than the Sun and is therefore not massive enough to be a black hole.

31 May 1991: The ESO New Technology Telescope on La Silla has again proven its extraordinary abilities. Known since two years as the world's best optical telescope [1], it has now produced the "deepest" view into the distant regions of the Universe ever obtained with any ground-or space-based telescope. The new picture shows enormous numbers of extremely faint and remote galaxies whose images almost completely fill the field of view. Expressed in astronomical terms, the picture reaches beyond magnitude 29 [2].