Looking up from Chile’s arid Atacama Desert, home to some of the clearest starscapes on Earth, a massive new telescope has taken its first breathtaking photos of the southern night sky. The VLT Survey Telescope, or VST, uses a 268-megapixel camera. Over the next five years it will capture 150 terabytes worth of visible-light data, supplement existing surveys and help astronomers study the universe in fresh detail. On June 8, astronomers released the first two VST images. One is a 660-megabyte portrait of the Swan Nebula (above). The other is an equally detailed shot of Omega Centauri, a star-rich globular cluster sometimes called the jewel of the southern night sky. In this gallery we’ll show you the telescope and what it took to create these colossal space photos. Image: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM [high-resolution version available]

Observation Night Time-lapse footage of the VST in action. Videos: ESO/Stéphane Guisard

Inside the VLT Survey Telescope The telescope opens for business at sunset (above). Schematics of the survey unit’s side and front (below) reveal its scale and inner structure. Images: 1) ESO/G. Lombardi [high-resolution version available] 2) ESO [high-resolution version available]

OmegaCAM At the heart of the VST is a nearly 1-ton camera called OmegaCAM (above). It uses a 268-million-pixel bed of image sensors (below) to take highly detailed images. Images: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM/O. Iwert [high-resolution versions available: top, bottom]

Surveying the Night Sky Astronomers will use the telescope to make three highly detailed surveys of the southern sky. The target regions are color-coded here in red, green and blue. Image: ESO [high-resolution version available]