Welcome to planet La Silla

Nestled within Chile’s Atacama Desert, La Silla Observatory experiences over 300 cloudless nights a year. This impressive image cleverly captures the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) first observatory – La Silla – against the backdrop of the Milky Way. The tiny ‘planet’ was created using a photography technique called stereographic projection, which involves the projection of a flat image into a sphere. La Silla is home to several ESO instruments, including the New Technology Telescope (NTT), Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the highly successful exoplanet hunter, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS).