Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2023

38 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING strategic partners, ESO brings to- gether scientists and engineers from across the globe to develop and op- erate advanced ground-based ob- servatories in Chile that enable breakthrough astronomical discov- eries. To mark its 60 th anniversary, ESO released this extraordinary im- age of the Cone Nebula, captured with one of ESO's telescopes and se- lected by the observatory staff. The image is part of a campaign which celebrated ESO’s 60 th anniver- sary in late 2022, both on social by ESO - Juan Carlos Muñoz Mateos The Cone Nebula as seen by the VLT F or the past 60 years the Euro- pean Southern Observatory (ESO) has been enabling scien- tists worldwide to discover the se- crets of the Universe. We mark this milestone by bringing you a spec- tacular new image of a star factory, the Cone Nebula, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). On 5 October 1962 five countries signed the convention to create ESO. Now, six decades later and sup- ported by 16 Member States and T his image from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) shows the region of the sky around the Cone Nebula. The nebulous area at the centre of the image is NGC 2264, an area of the sky that includes the Christmas Tree star cluster and the Cone Nebula below it (at the very centre of the frame). [ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: D. De Martin]