Cerro Paranal

Right.

You have CTAO South in the Atacama Desert in Paranal, Chile.

Which will have dozens of telescopes looking right at the galactic center.

And then you have CTAO North at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands, observing the northern sky.

The Atacama hosts more major astronomical installations than any other region on Earth.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope sits at Cerro Paranal at an altitude of 2,600 meters.

where the median number of clear nights per year exceeds 330.

The Atacama Large Millimetre Array operates at over 5,000 metres on the Chajnantor Plateau, where the air is so thin and dry that visitors must carry supplemental oxygen and the humidity is sometimes too low for the instruments to accurately measure.

They line up, and then the confirmation needed a third instrument.

ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal in the Atacama had also caught a faint point of light in that gap.

Put the three together, ALMA showing you the gap in millimeter dust, the VLT and Keck both showing you an infrared source sitting in it at two separate epochs two years apart, so you can check it is moving with the star rather than being a background object, and you have a planet.

Bernardi made a point of that in the release, something like, "We usually hear about telescopes working separately, but this confirmation was only possible by using multiple telescopes together." Which is worth sitting with for a second because it is also a story about hemispheres.

The mirror is also the most highly curved of its size and quality ever made, and its construction was a major challenge.

The telescope is housed in a dome close to ESO’s VLT on Cerro Paranal, so it shares the top-quality observing conditions found at the site.

At the heart of VISTA is a 3-tonne camera containing 16 special detectors sensitive to infrared light with a combined total of 67 megapixels.

This huge instrument provides the widest sky coverage of any astronomical near-infrared camera.

And a small southern footnote.

The LP 890-9 system was found by SPECULOOS, a survey hunting planets around the coolest stars, whose southern station sits at Paranal in Chile, under the same skies as the telescopes that keep turning up in this program.

Quick update before the Skywatch on a story we left open a couple of weeks back.

NASA's Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station is now targeting no earlier than late September.