Season’s greetings from the European Southern Observatory!

The background picture was taken shortly before sunrise by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky, who works as an astronomer at the La Silla Paranal Observatory. The night sky above Cerro Paranal, the home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), is dark and dotted with the bright stars of the Milky Way, and more distant galaxies. But it is very rare to see the ground contrasting with the sky as markedly as in this photograph, which shows a gentle layer of white snow dotted with darker spots of the desert terrain beneath. Read more at: http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1132a/