ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in the Atacama Desert region of Chile:
La Silla,
Paranal
and Chajnantor. ESO's first site is at La Silla, a 2400 m high mountain
600 km north of Santiago de Chile. It is equipped with several optical
telescopes with mirror diameters of up to 3.6 metres. The
3.5-metre New Technology Telescope
broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first
in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror, a technology
developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world's current large
telescopes. The
ESO 3.6-metre telescope is now home to the world's foremost extrasolar planet hunter:
HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), a spectrograph with unrivalled precision.
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