From Stairs to The Stars in Chile | European Southern Observatory

From Stairs to The Stars in Chile | European Southern Observatory

At the center of the image is the silhouette of a person standing on a tall viewing platform, at least five meters high and almost just as wide. It has a two-level staircase leading up to it. The dark foreground silhouette of stairs and platform contrasts with the night sky filled with stars, showing blue and green hues, and the cloudy, white Milky Way plane reaching across, diagonally. At the top right, two orange laser beams seem to come out of the galactic plane, going diagonally to the top of the image.

Apart from actually going to space, you probably will not feel much closer to the stars than at the top of the staircase at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory shown in this picture. At 2,635 meters (plus 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 center of the Milky Way has turned itself into a dragon with a strange, orange tongue. However, the only thing sneaking up on you in this picture is the sheer beauty of the night sky.

This is just a normal night for the European Southern Observatory'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. 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.

Image Credit: F. Millour/ESO
Release Date: March 3, 2025

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