YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE
A split sky
© ESO
The Moon, Saturn and Mercury are all captured in this image, but can you identify where they are? The dusty area at the top of the frame is the Milky Way, which looks as if it cuts the sky in two horizontally. There you can identify the Lagoon Nebula, Cat’s Paw Nebula and Trifid Nebula.
But where are those celestial bodies? In the centre is a bright object – it’s not the Sun, but the Moon reflecting our star’s light. Saturn is positioned slightly to the upper right and Mercury is to the lower left. As for the objects on the ground, these are the telescopes making up the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.