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ESO's Extremely Large Telescope may not have an original name, but it's accurate! Its 39 m main mirror will weigh about 200 tonnes, and what you see here is the huge cell that will hold it.

The mirror will comprise 798 hexagonal segments working together as a single mirror. All segment blanks have been cast and are now being polished, after which they'll be shipped to where they'll be coated with silver.

https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2430a/

📷ESO/G. Vecchia

The image shows a partially-constructed white hexagonal lattice structure with a honeycomb-like design, in the interior of a metallic dome structure with some blue cladding on the exterior. In the centre of the lattice structure, there is a hexagonal hole in the structure.

Soon the telescope platform at ESO's Paranal Observatory in will look very different at night: all four of the 8.2 m telescopes of the VLT will be equipped with lasers! This is one of the ongoing upgrades of the GRAVITY+ instrument, which will allow us to study black holes, stars and planets like never before.

Find out more in this great article by current and former ESO communication interns Elena Reiriz Martinez and Tom Howarth: https://www.eso.org/public/blog/gravity-leap-vlti/

Happy to those who celebrate! Here's a pic I took a few years ago back when I worked at ESO's Paranal Observatory in . One of our 8.2 m telescopes was pointing at the centre of the , home to Sagittarius A*, a 4 million times more massive than the .

Astronomers devoted almost a century to unmask this beast:

https://www.eso.org/public/blog/our-quest-for-sagittarius-a/

until the Event Horizon Telescope finally imaged it:

https://www.eso.org/public/science/EHT-MilkyWay/

A long-exposure night shot taken at an astronomical observatory under a starry sky. The are several huge cylindrical grey domes. The one in the foreground is shooting a yellow laser up to the sky. The laser is aimed at the centre of the Milky Way, which appears as a bright, somewhat orange band stretching diagonally across the sky, and divided longitudinally by dark clouds.

Need to blow off some steam? You're not alone –– galaxies sometimes do that too. Ok, not steam per se, but still.

This is NGC4383, observed with ESO's Very Large Telescope in . This nearby galaxy is undergoing a burst of intense star formation that is ejecting huge amounts of gas out of the galaxy, seen here as red filaments. 1/2

https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2427a/

📷 ESO/A. Watts et al.

A bright yellow/orange cloud against a black background. Lots of wispy red tendrils emerge above and below this cloud. Bright, compact red knots are also dotted across the image.