The new skyline of Cerro Armazones

This Picture of the Week shows a stunning pastel vista of Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama Desert. At the end of the zigzagging mountain road are several cranes that are responsible for the gradual addition of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) to this skyline. The leftmost crane is almost 120 m tall, which conveys the sheer size of this facility. At 3046 metres above sea level, the ELT will be left high and dry, ideal conditions for astronomical observations. There will be many clear night skies ready to be exposed to the ELT’s enormous 39-metre primary mirror.

The ELT will be able to better detect and study potentially habitable exoplanets, probe into the nature of black holes and dark matter, and may even lead us to unexpected evidence that leads us to question our understanding of fundamental physics.

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• Panoramic version of this image