The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is the latest addition to be installed in the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile.
It is the world’s largest telescope dedicated entirely to viewing outer space in visible light. To understand how powerful it is, take the Leo Triplet as an example.
This group of three interacting galaxies is about 35 million light-years from Earth. Other telescopes can only show one out of the galaxies at a time, whereas the VST shows all three at once.
VST’s view is twice as wide as the full moon, and it can capture large areas of the sky quickly. One of the ESO’s goals for the VST is to see faint and distant objects in the Milky Way that may not have been spotted before.
