Looking into crystal-clear skies

ESO’s La Silla Observatory boasts a remarkably high number of cloud-free nights a year. The billions of stars that make up the Milky Way is a very common sight indeed. The dome shown in this image houses one of three 60-centimetre telescopes that make up the ExTrA project, which had its first light in late 2017.

This small group of telescopes is primarily designed to detect distant exoplanets transiting in front of bright and nearby red dwarf stars. The project aims to discover as many transiting planets as possible — including Earth-size planets in the habitable-zone — and to determine their structure and composition. These planets will then be observed by the world’s largest telescopes, in order to characterise their atmospheres.