Credit: ESO/MOONS team/VVV survey

This image shows some of the first spectra captured by the MOONS instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The background image was taken with the now-retired VIRCAM infrared camera, and shows Baade’s window, an area in the sky towards the centre of the Milky Way. The circles mark the position of the MOONS optical fibres. Each fibre captures the light of a single star and redirects it to one of two spectrographs, which decompose it into its constituent infrared colours or wavelengths. The inset shows the spectra of five stars, which exhibit the chemical fingerprints of sulphur (S), iron (Fe), titanium (Ti), silicon (Si), chromium (Cr) and magnesium (Mg).

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/ann26007c/

Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License