Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020

I s it Pac-Man trying to swallow the Moon or a fortuitous photo of one of our VLT Auxiliary telescopes on the cover of the 2020 ESO Calendar? The calendar, which is available in the ES- Oshop, has 12 images — a selection of our best photos of the cosmos and our telescopes against the stunning Chilean landscape —which will accompany you throughout the year. For the month of March, you can enjoy the breathtaking Milky Way over the site of the biggest eye on the sky, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. Just imagine what this place will look like in 2025 when the giant, 40-metre class tele- scope is ready to uncover some of the mysteries of the Universe that can only be tackled with a facility of this size. The month of July brings you a com- posite image of the phases of the 2019 Total Solar Eclipse from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, a celestial show we were lucky to witness during the observatory’s 50 th anniversary. In September you can marvel at the first picture of a black hole, made pos- sible thanks to a truly global collabora- tion, while December brings you a colourful and wispy view of cloud Sharpless 2-296 — the “wings” of the Seagull Nebula — carrying you into the holiday season. You can view the indi- vidual pages of the calendar here https://www.eso.org/public/usa/pro- ducts/calendars/?search=cal2020 Also, marked for each month, are the dates of the lunar phases. The calendar measures 43 × 43 centime- tres and has 14 pages, with a cardboard back. It is available in the ESOshop https://www.eso.org/public/usa/shop/ product/calendar_2020 for 9.50 euros.