A Cerro Tololo Sky
High atop a
Chilean mountain lies one of the
premier observatories of the southern sky:
Cerro Tololo.
Pictured above is one of the
premier telescopes of the
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and of the past quarter-century: the
4-meter Blanco Telescope.
Far behind the telescope are thousands of individual stars and diffuse light from three galaxies: the
Small Magellanic Cloud
(upper left), the
Large Magellanic Cloud
(lower left), and our
Milky Way Galaxy (right).
Visible just to Blanco's right is the
famous superposition of four bright stars known as the
Southern Cross.
The observatory structures are lit solely by starlight.