X-Nico

2 unusual facts about Very Large Telescope


Very Large Telescope

The ESO Hotel, the Residencia, is an award-winning building, and served as a backdrop for part of the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.

One of the large mirrors of the telescopes was the subject of an episode of the National Geographic Channel's reality series World's Toughest Fixes, where a crew of engineers removed and transported the mirror to be cleaned and re-coated with aluminium.


Barnard 68

Despite being opaque at visible-light wavelengths, use of the Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal has revealed the presence of about 3,700 blocked background Milky Way stars, some 1,000 of which are visible at infrared wavelengths.

Extremely large telescope

The Very Large Telescope, of the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, is also of note, with 4 × 8.2 m, 4 × 1.8, and 1 × 2.61, all on separate mounts but in one building for interferometry.


see also