The European Southern Observatory

9th February
The European Southern Observatory
8 p.m. start at Bredhurst Village Hall Peter Grimley – The European Southern Observatory: over 60 years at the cutting edge of astronomy. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) was established in 1962 to provide astronomers in Europe with access to the southern skies by operating an observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, via an agreement with the government of Chile. Its five founding Member States have now grown to sixteen, including the UK, which joined in 2002. Since its inception ESO has been at the forefront of technological and engineering development and it now operates a suite of telescopes on three sites, alongside a number of hosted instruments located at ESO’s observatory sites. ESO is currently building the biggest telescope ever constructed – the ELT. In this talk I will describe ESO, its history and some of the cutting-edge instruments it now operates, and I will highlight just a few of the remarkable discoveries made with those facilities.