ESO – European Southern observatory

We are an intergovernmental organisation established in 1962 supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), our host country Chile and strategic partners. ESO brings together over 750 staff from more than 30 countries, and countless more collaborators worldwide, all driven by the passion to build the best telescopes, serve the community and benefit society. We are humbled by the privilege to serve more than 22 000 users from over 130 different countries with excellent infrastructure, services, technologies and data. All our telescopes are currently located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvelous place with unique conditions to observe the sky. ESO operates three observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. In addition, we are building “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”—ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, located on Cerro Armazones, which will be operated as part of the Paranal Observatory. At La Silla, ESO’s first observatory, we operate two of the most productive 4-metre-class telescopes in the world. Paranal is the home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), one of the most advanced optical telescopes in the world, and its unique Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA and VST. In the future, Paranal will also host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. Collaboratively with international partners, ESO operates APEX and ALMA on the Chajnantor plateau. ALMA allows scientists to investigate the Universe in the millimetre and submillimetre wavelength range of light.