List server
Season
Season 1 Episode
- Season 1 James Bond at Paranal
- Season 1 Unprecedented 16-year long study tracks stars orbiting Milky Way black hole
- Season 1 The ALMA observatory gets its first 'eye'
- Season 1 24 hours in the life of an ESO astronomer
- Season 1 ESO's First Observatory Celebrates 40th Anniversary
- Season 1 Lightest Exoplanet Found
- Season 1 Behind every great astronomer stands a great engineer
- Season 1 Celestial Tango Makes for a Gorgeous Nebula
- Season 1 GigaGalaxy Zoom: The Sky, from the Eye to the Telescope
- Season 1 New Exoplanets Found
- Season 1 VISTA: A Pioneering New Survey Telescope Starts Work
- Season 1 A sharper view of the Universe with the VLT Interferometer
- Season 1 Orion in a New Light
- Season 1 Recoating a Giant VLT Mirror
- Season 1 E-ELT Site Chosen
- Season 1 Constructing ALMA — The World's Largest Observatory
- Season 1 Exoplanet Caught on the Move
- Season 1 Photographers of the Night
- Season 1 Richest planetary system discovered
- Season 1 The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS)
- Season 1 The most distant galaxy ever measured
- Season 1 A telescope's wire to the world
- Season 1 First planet of extragalactic origin
- Season 1 Chasing Gamma Ray Bursts at Top Speed: The VLT’s Rapid Response Mode
- Season 1 Life and Leisure at Paranal
- Season 1 An ESO Astronomer at Work
- Season 1 ESO Hidden Treasures Competition
- Season 1 Running a Desert Town
- Season 1 First Images from the VLT Survey Telescope -- VST and 268 megapixel OmegaCAM start work
- Season 1 Pandora's Cluster
- Season 1 Most Distant Quasar Found
- Season 1 Under Chilean Skies
- Season 1 How To Stop a Star's Twinkle - The astronomy podcast exploring the cosmic frontier with Dr J
- Season 1 Fifty New Exoplanets
- Season 1 ALMA Opens Its Eyes
- Season 1 Full-size Mock-up of World's Largest Telescope Mirror Built at ESO's Open House Day
- Season 1 Faraway Eris is Pluto’s twin
- Season 1 A Black Hole’s Dinner is Fast Approaching
- Season 1 When Speed Matters - Discovery of the Accelerating Universe Wins 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics
- Season 1 Going South - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 1
- Season 1 Looking Up - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 2
- Season 1 Seeing Sharp - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 3
- Season 1 Special: Changing Views -- Special 50th anniversary episode #4
- Season 1 Reaching Out - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 5
- Season 1 Catching Light - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 6
- Season 1 Finding Life - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 7
- Season 1 Building Big — Special 50th Anniversary Episode 8
- Season 1 On Air – Behind the Scenes of A Day in The Life of ESO
- Season 1 Chile Chill 1
- Season 1 All Systems Go for Highest Altitude Supercomputer
ESOcast - Season 1 Episode 46 Catching Light - Special 50th Anniversary Episode 6
0.00 48 minutes ESOcast 46 is the sixth special episode of this series. It describes how state-of-the-art cameras and spectrographs help ESO’s powerful telescopes collect and analyse the faint light from the distant Universe. Without these instruments, ESO’s eyes on the sky would be blind. Today’s astronomical images are very different from those from the 1960s. Back then, astronomers used large photographic glass plates, which were not very sensitive and hard to handle. Nowadays, ESO’s telescopes use some of the largest and most sensitive electronic detectors in the world. They catch almost every cosmic photon and recover almost every possible bit of information. For instance, the VLT Survey Telescope’s camera — OmegaCAM — has 32 detectors, which team up to produce spectacular images of the Universe, each with an impressive 268 million pixels. But astronomy is not only about taking breathtaking images.
