May 14, 2001
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us, and yet here you are — a collection of atoms that somehow learned to think, to...
A Cerro Tololo Sky
Birthday · May 14, 2001
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APOD published May 14, 2001. Credit: Roger Smith. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
High atop a Chilean mountain lies one of the premier observatories of the southern sky: Cerro Tololo. Pictured above is one of the premier telescopes of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and of the past quarter-century: the 4-meter Blanco Telescope. Far behind the telescope are thousands of individual stars and diffuse light from three galaxies: the Small Magellanic Cloud (upper left), the Large Magellanic Cloud (lower left), and our Milky Way Galaxy (right). Visible just to Blanco's right is the famous superposition of four bright stars known as the Southern Cross. The observatory structures are lit solely by starlight.
Image credit: Roger Smith