The MUSE instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope

This view shows the VLT Unit Telescope 4 inside its enclosure. The telescope itself appears in the centre and the new MUSE instrument on the left. This unique and powerful tool for discovery uses 24 spectrographs to separate light into its component colours to create both images and spectra of selected regions of the sky. MUSE couples the discovery potential of an imaging device with the measuring capabilities of a spectrograph, while taking advantage of the much better image sharpness provided by adaptive optics.