June - A luminous arc above the VLT

The entire arc of the Milky Way stretches across the sky above the ESO-operated Very Large Telescope (VLT). Full of gas and dust, star clusters and emission nebulae, the Milky Way is home to an estimated hundreds of billions of stars.

Based at the Cerro Paranal site in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, the VLT is made up of four telescopes, seen in the foreground. These are named in the indigenous Mapuche language: Antu (Sun), Kueyen (Moon), Melipal (Southern Cross) and Yepun (Evening star).