A Panoramic View of Outer Space

For the Geo Quiz, consider that there are billions of stars and galaxies out there to identify and study. So astronomers are kept very busy mapping out the far reaches of the universe.

The panoramic image (above) is part of a research project called the Cosmos Survey. It comes from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) observation site in South America, an observatory equipped with the VISTA telescope.

So can you name the observatory or the country where this telescope is located. It’s in a remote spot in the Atacama Desert away from urban light pollution.

The Paranal Observatory in Chile is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

James Dunlop at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Astronomy says the image shows more than 200, 000 galaxies formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, including some of the most distant galaxies ever seen in the distant universe.