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Blobrana


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VISTA creates largest ever catalogue of centre of our galaxy

eso1242a.jpg

Using a whopping nine-gigapixel image from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory, an international team of astronomers has created a catalogue of more than 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way. This gigantic dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. It is so large that, if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 metres long and 7 metres tall.
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Blobrana


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A 4.1-metre diameter primary mirror, a vital part of the world's newest and fastest survey telescope, VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) has been delivered to its new mountaintop home at Cerro Paranal, Chile. The mirror will now be coupled with a small camera for initial testing prior to installing the main camera in June. Full scientific operations are due to start early next year. VISTA will form part of ESO's Very Large Telescope facility.

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Blobrana


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On a dusty mountaintop in the Atacama desert of northern Chile, a large telescope funded and led by Britain is taking shape.
The £36m facility is gradually being assembled near the Chilean peak of Cerro Paranal.
Vista (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) will be part of the European Southern Observatory (Eso).
Eso is a research organisation comprising 13 member countries - including the UK.
The telescope will use infrared wavelengths to detect objects that are too distant or too cool to be seen using the visible spectrum.

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Blobrana


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The world's biggest infrared camera for Europe's newest telescope left the UK today (17th January 2007) for its flight to Santiago in Chile. The infrared camera will sit at the focal point of VISTA - a UK provided survey telescope being constructed in Chile for ESO, the Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere. VISTA will be able to map the infrared sky faster than any previous telescope, studying areas of the Universe that are hard to see in the optical region of the spectrum due to either (or all of) their cool temperature, surrounding dust or their high redshift.
The 2.9 tonne VISTA camera has been designed and built by a consortium including CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) in Edinburgh and the University of Durham.

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Blobrana


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In the heart of Oxfordshire, plans are being readied to ship the final and most crucial parts of another telescope, an all-British project, to the rocky, high-altitude desert in northern Chile.

The arrival of the four metres-wide main mirror, precision-polished at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, and the world's largest infrared digital camera next month will herald the start of the delicate assembly phase of the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (Vista).
Vista is a £36m British-designed and funded project involving 18 universities that will survey the southern skies when completed next year. Its 64 megapixel camera will provide high-quality images which will identify objects invisible to optical telescopes, such as brown dwarfs - low mass objects barely able to produce any light - or faraway objects formed at the beginning of the universe.

"The biggest discoveries are the ones we haven't yet thought of" - Jim Emerson, an astronomer at Queen Mary, London and the principal investigator of the Vista collaboration.

Operating in the infrared will also allow Vista to see through the huge clouds of dust that block visible light in large parts of the galaxy. It is usually in here that new stars are born. The telescope will also look for the farthest galaxies and provide clues on how galaxies form.

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