Paranal Telescopes and Instruments

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal is ESO's premier site for observations in the visible and infrared. All four unit telescopes of 8.2m diameter are individually in operation with the instruments listed below.

The VLT offers also the possibility of combining coherently the light from the four UTs to work as an interferometer, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), with its own suite of instruments, ultimately providing imagery at the milli arcsecond level as well as astrometry at 10 micro arcsecond precision. In addition to the 8.2m telescopes the VLTI will soon be complemented with four Auxiliary Telescopes (AT) of 1.8m diameter to improve its imaging capabilities and enable full nighttime use on a year-round basis

Two telescopes for imaging surveys are available on Paranal. The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA, 4m) which started regular service observations in 2010, and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST, 2.6m) for the visible with the camera OmegaCAM, which is expected to start observations in 2011.

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News

Please check the Latest News from Paranal Observatory and the Latest News on ESO Instrumentation.

First Generation VLT Instruments

Eleven first generation instruments are in operation at the VLT. From October 1st 2009 also the first second generation instrument xshooter started operations succesfully. They are offered each semester through a Call for observing proposals and are operated by Paranal Science Operations. We give an overview of their global observing capabilities, together with a short description of the VLT's observational strategy. The current instrument distribution among the four VLT Unit Telescopes is shown in the map and table below, which also contain links to VLTI, VST & VISTA instruments.

(Instruments available in Paranal)

VLT Instrumentation

Currently, the instruments are or will be mounted on the telescopes at these foci:

Telescope Focus
  Nasmyth A Cassegrain Nasmyth B interferometric
UT1 (ANTU) CRIRES FORS2 VISITOR

MIDI

AMBER

PRIMA
UT2 (KUEYEN) FLAMES XSHOOTER UVES
UT3 (MELIPAL) ISAAC VISIR VIMOS
UT4 (YEPUN) HAWK-I SINFONI NACO
Laser Guide Star
VST n/a OmegaCAM n/a n/a
VISTA n/a VIRCAM n/a n/a

Instruments or facilities still under construction or commissioning are indicated in italics.

Second Generation VLT Instruments

The process for the construction of the approved second generation of VLT Instruments is now in progress:

  • XSHOOTER (wide-band [UV to near infrared] point source spectrometer) has been installed at UT2 Cassegrain and has been offered to the community starting from P84
  • KMOS (a cryogenic infrared multi-object spectrometer) is in the Manufacture, Assembly, Integration and Test (MAIT) phase
  • MUSE (a huge "3-dimensional" spectroscopic explorer) is in the Manufacture, Assembly, Integration and Test (MAIT) phase
  • SPHERE (a high contrast exoplanet searcher) is in the Manufacture, Assembly, Integration and Test (MAIT) phase

Decommissioned Instruments

Information on Paranal decommissioned instruments is available on a separate page.

VLT Visitor Instruments

Apart from these "Facility Instruments" which are available to the whole community ESO offers the possibility to instrument teams to build instruments for their own use, highly specialised towards the well defined scientific goals of the team. See the dedicated page for this Visitor Focus.

Imaging Survey Instruments at Paranal

The VST and VISTA are both equipped with wide-field imaging cameras, OmegaCAM for the visible at the VST and VIRCAM for VISTA.

Other Facilities of Use for Observers

Paranal is operating an All Sky Monitor called MASCOT. Although no real-time images are (yet) available, images (taken every three minutes) can be retrieved from the Science Archive.