The Southern Cross and the Milky Way at dusk over the Cerro Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile. One of the auxiliary telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) is in the foreground. Operated by the ESO (European Southern Observatory), the VLT interferometer is one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, located at an altitude of 2635 metres. The bright stars Alpha and Beta Centauri appear at right, below the Southern Cross (Crux). Above the telescope is the bright globular cluster Omega Centauri, the most massive in our galaxy with about 10 million stars.