Astronomy Picture of the Day -- When Gemini Sends Stars to Paranal

NASA ^ | December 13, 2015 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: From a radiant point in the constellation of the Twins, the annual Geminid meteor shower rain down on planet Earth. Tonight, the Geminds reach their peak and could be quite spectacular. The featured blended image, however, captured the shower's impressive peak in the year 2012. The beautiful skyscape collected Gemini's lovely shooting stars in a careful composite of 30 exposures, each 20 seconds long, from the dark of the Chilean Atacama Desert over ESO's Paranal Observatory. In the foreground Paranal's four Very Large Telescopes, four Auxillary Telescopes, and the VLT Survey telescope are all open and observing. The skies above are shared with bright Jupiter (left), Orion, (top left), and the faint light of the Milky Way. Dust swept up from the orbit of active asteroid 3200 Phaethon, Gemini's meteors enter Earth's atmosphere traveling at about 22 kilometers per second.

[SunkenCiv]

[Credit and Copyright: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN]

[SunkenCiv]

The Big One

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[Fungi]

Pictures are easy, anyone can do that.

[onyx]

I had to check out the location of this photo’s origin because the buildings puzzled me: Observatory in
the Atacama desert in Chile.

[o_1_2_3__]

It’s not funny if Uranus is Paranal.

[null and void]

It's not funny if Uranus is Paranal.

Even less funny the other way around...

[Red Badger]

When Gemini Sends Stars to Paranal

There are some stars I'd like to send to Paranal..................