A chance tweet brought to my attention this video that fits well with a news story that’s been doing the rounds for a few days. This concerns a very deep and wide survey called UltraVISTA, that has been made using the VISTA telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. You can find the full press release from ESO that started the media interest here, where some lovely images can also be found.
VISTA is the world’s largest infra-red survey telescope, and is unusual among telescopes for having only one instrument on it, an Infra-red camera. Technically, therefore, it should really be called ISTA; owing to cost constraints the Visible camera that was initially proposed to accompany the Infra-red one and supply the V in its acronym, was never built. Anyway, VISTA was designed explicitly to do survey work involving very distant and faint objects; its forte is to allow very deep images to be made with a very wide field of view, as demonstrated on the video…
Since I’m using the handle “telescoper” on this blog, I suppose I really should post about telescopes a bit more often than I do but I hope this will do for now!
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In the Dark 