APOD 3.3

La Silla Star Trails North and South (February 2, 2012)

This picture was taken with a tripod set up at ESO's La Silla Observatory in the Atacama desert of Chile.  The camera was out for about 4 hours on the night of January 24 and the picture is a composite of 250 consecutive 1-minute exposures, looking toward the north. The 15-meter diameter dish is of the Swedish-ESO Submillimeter Telescope (now decommissioned).  Right of the dish is the dome of the observatory's 3.6 meter telescope, which holds the planet hunting HARPS spectrograph.