ESO’s La Silla Observatory on a moonless

night, deep in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

It should be very dark -- but strange green

and red colours can be seen to shimmer in

the sky. What are these mysterious glows? And why

do they seem to be getting more frequent? Find out more in this episode.

Images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have revealed unique and totally unexpected structures in the dusty disc around the star AU Microscopii. These fast-moving wave-like dust features are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted, before now.

ESO telescopes are being used to search for the subtle signs of magnetic fields in other stars and even to map out the star spots on their surfaces. This information is beginning to reveal how and why so many stars, including our own Sun, are magnetic, and what the implications might be for life on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe.

Astronomers using ESO facilities have been advancing astronomical studies for decades. Along the way, there have been many truly significant findings that have had a major impact on our understanding of the Universe.

ESOcast 74 looks at ESO’s pair of survey telescopes at Paranal: the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST).

ESOcast 73 looks at the "Your ESO Pictures" Flickr group, where amateurs and professionals alike contribute their photos related to ESO.