This autumn, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) celebrates its 40th anniversary. As current ESO director Catherine Cesarsky looks back fondly on the last four decades, she remembers “one full generation of scientists, a wonderful time during which many of our dreams, our hopes, and our goals have finally come true.”
ESO has proved to be a real success story, crowned today with the world-class Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, which provided the first interferometric fringes from all four telescopes just in time for the anniversary celebrations.
In the early days, ESO was based at CERN. The Geneva laboratory housed the science department, and also the team that produced the Sky Atlas for ESO and the UK Schmidt telescope. The first ESO observatory went into operation in 1968 at La Silla on a remote mountain top in the Atacama desert, Chile. The first telescope was a 1 m photometric model. Today, the site is home to nine telescopes, including the 3.5 m New Technology Telescope and the Swedish ESO Submillimetre Telescope, the only large submillimetre telescope in the southern hemisphere.
Construction started at ESO’s Paranal observatory in 1994. The observatory now houses the VLT’s four 8.2 m telescopes, and other smaller auxiliary telescopes are due to be installed in 2003.
The 40th anniversary is also the ideal occasion to look to the future, as ESO prepares for ALMA, an array of submillimetre antennae, and OWL, the ground-based, fully steerable, 100 m optical telescope (CERN Courier September 2000). Says Cesarsky: “The challenges ahead are commensurate with the achievements of today.”
