From the stairs to the stars

Apart from actually going to space, you probably won’t feel much closer to the stars than at the top of the staircase at ESO’s Paranal Observatory shown in this picture. At 2635 metres (plus some twenty steps) above sea level in the Atacama Desert of Chile, you see a wealth of stars that remain hidden in other places, because Paranal boasts the darkest skies of all major observatories on Earth. 

At first glance, the centre of the Milky Way has turned itself into a dragon with a strange, orange tongue. But the only thing sneaking up on you in this Picture of the Week is the sheer beauty of the night sky.

This is just a normal night for ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which has its home in Paranal. The bright yellow beams are the VLT’s laser guide stars, shooting up from the telescope (to the right, but outside of the frame) into the sky. The laser beams create artificial stars high up in the atmosphere, which the telescope’s adaptive optics system uses to make the sharpest possible observations of the cosmos, from the ground. The staircase is used for accessing the VLT’s smaller Auxiliary Telescopes from the outside, but they also provide amazing photo opportunities. With a view like this, it really feels like it is only a small step from the stairs to the stars.