File:Counting sheep on the Chajnantor plateau (potw2328a).jpg

Original file (3,840 × 2,160 pixels, file size: 2.07 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Summary

Description
English: This Picture of the Week shows a beautiful flock of sheep, grazing in the Chilean Andes. No, wait, wait, wait. There's no grass to feed on here, and they are at an altitude of around 5000 metres. Ok, no, they are not sheep. Let’s start again. This Picture of the Week shows the beautiful antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), operated by ESO and its international partners in the Chilean Andes. Ok, that’s better!As you can see, ALMA’s 66 white antennas are not the same size: most of them are 12-metre antennas, and only twelve are 7-metre antennas (see the smaller ones over to the left of the ‘flock’?). They work together as an interferometer, acting like a single big telescope. ALMA observes the light emitted from some of the coldest objects in the Universe, such as the most distant galaxies.These antennas can be physically moved and arranged in different configurations, allowing ALMA to view the Universe with different levels of detail. The telescope can in fact probe both the broad structure of an astronomical source and its very finest details. The former requires the antennas to be close to each other, like in this image, whereas for the latter they need to be several kilometres apart. Each antenna is almost 15 metres high and weighs over 100 tons, so moving them across the desert and positioning them on concrete docking pads with millimetre precision is anything but simple — much trickier than herding sheep. To this end, two enormous transporters provided by ESO are used: yellow, 20 metres long and with 28 tyres each, they have been named Otto and Lore.
Date 10 July 2023 (upload date)
Source
This media was produced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), under the identifier potw2328a

This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing.

Author ESO
Other versions

Licensing

This media was created by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Their website states: "Unless specifically noted, the images, videos, and music distributed on the public ESO website, along with the texts of press releases, announcements, pictures of the week, blog posts and captions, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided the credit is clear and visible."
To the uploader: You must provide a link (URL) to the original file and the authorship information if available.
w:en:Creative Commons
attribution
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
You are free:
  • to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
  • attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Captions

This Picture of the Week shows a beautiful flock of sheep, grazing in the Chilean Andes. No, wait, wait, wait. There's no grass to feed on here, and they are at an altitude of around 5000 metres. Ok, no, they are not sheep. Let’s start again.

Items portrayed in this file

depicts

image/jpeg

2,160 pixel

3,840 pixel

2,171,811 byte

7683700a4c75aad112db62aa0b351b35fcd2e0a4

10 July 2023

2yp2kqn6a78lahehx43zcl3qgwya26l117hlzknpfv7tl2zyf4

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current07:15, 10 July 2023Thumbnail for version as of 07:15, 10 July 20233,840 × 2,160 (2.07 MB)OptimusPrimeBot#Spacemedia - Upload of https://cdn.eso.org/images/large/potw2328a.jpg via Commons:Spacemedia

The following page uses this file:

Metadata