The Paranal Observatory is located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert in the northern part of Chile (map) and what is believed to be the driest area on Earth. Cerro Paranal is a 2,635-m high ...

ESO's ruling body is its Council, which delegates day to day responsibility to the Executive under ESO's Director General. Other governing bodies of ESO are: the Finance Committee (FC), the Scientific ...

HARPS is the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla. The ...

NAOMI is the Adpative Optics that are used with VLTI/ATs. It consists in four sets of deformable mirrors with 241 actuators , 4x4 Shack-Hartman sensors and SPARTA Real Time Control operating in the ...

The HAWAII 1024 x 1024 readout is structured in four independent quadrants having four outputs. Six CMOS-level clocks, two 5V power supplies (one analog and one digital), on e fixed dc bias and one ...

Proposals for observing time on all facilities of the La Silla Paranal Observatory (VLT/I, NTT, 3.6m) must be submitted using the p1 web system: The new p1 user interface collects the same information ...

The FORS Upgrade project (FORS-Up) aims at bringing a new life to FORS, which started started regular science operations in 2000. In order to ensure that FORS shall remain operational for at least ...

The User Support Department (USD) of the ESO Data Management and Operations Division is based in Garching bei München, Germany. Its main activities consist in providing support to users of ESO La ...

All the information about the instrument itself, its modes and their characteristics. Since Period 114, to be used for Phase I and Phase II preparation. (no changed wrt to P113) Also valid in ...

Institute codes can be found using the following pull-down menus. First look up the country corresponding to the affiliation of your Co-I(s) and then find the codes corresponding to your Co-I(s) ...

Today’s Picture of the Week shows an exciting milestone: the massive altitude structure of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) was tilted for the first time in October 2026. To get the full range of ...

The ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT) is an Alt-Az, 3.58m Richey-Chretien telescope which pioneered the use of active optics. The telescope and its enclosure had a revolutionary design for optimal ...