ESOcast SD

Europe to the Stars — ESO’s first 50 years of exploring the southern sky (Full movie)

Eyes on the Skies (Full movie)

ESO’s La Silla Observatory on a moonless night, deep in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It should be very dark -- but strange green and red colours can be seen to shimmer in the sky. What are these mysterious glows? And why do they seem to be getting more frequent? Find out more in this episode.

Images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have revealed unique and totally unexpected structures in the dusty disc around the star AU Microscopii. These fast-moving wave-like dust features are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted, before now.

ESO telescopes are being used to search for the subtle signs of magnetic fields in other stars and even to map out the star spots on their surfaces. This information is beginning to reveal how and why so many stars, including our own Sun, are magnetic, and what the implications might be for life on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe.

ESO welcome video (Spanish)

Astronomers using ESO facilities have been advancing astronomical studies for decades. Along the way, there have been many truly significant findings that have had a major impact on our understanding of the Universe.

ESO welcome video (English)

ESOcast 74 looks at ESO’s pair of survey telescopes at Paranal: the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST).

Hubble view of the galaxy cluster Abell 3827

ESOcast 73 looks at the "Your ESO Pictures" Flickr group, where amateurs and professionals alike contribute their photos related to ESO.

A zoom into Abell 1689 and a very remote dusty galaxy

The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever three-dimensional view of the deep Universe. After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South region for a total of 27 hours the new observations reveal the distances, motions and other properties of far more galaxies than ever before in this tiny piece of the sky. But they also go beyond Hubble and reveal many previously unseen objects.

This ESOcast takes a close look at an unusual new group of small telescopes that has recently achieved first light at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile.

The European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT for short, will be by far the largest optical and near-infrared telescope in the world. In early December 2014 the ESO Council gave the go-ahead for the first construction phase of the telescope.