Observing / Telescopes
Ground-based telescopes
Interactive map of major ground-based observatories, night-sky webcams and real-time public data.
Click a marker to discover a ground-based observatory, its webcams, latest observation images and major discoveries.
Outreach / Understand
Cosmic messengers
The universe doesn’t only send us light. It also emits gravitational waves, neutrinos and cosmic rays, distinct “messengers” that need different instruments to capture. Here is a no-jargon tour to understand how we “listen” to the cosmos.
All the light we capture is an electromagnetic wave. But its wavelength spans 17 orders of magnitude: from ultra-energetic gamma rays (smaller than an atom) to radio waves of several kilometres. Each band reveals a different universe, and every telescope is specialised in a particular window.
The most energetic photons. Emitted by gamma-ray bursts, black holes and the most violent events in the universe.
They reveal ultra-hot gases (millions of °C) around black holes and in galaxy clusters. Observed by Chandra, XMM-Newton.
Ultraviolet light shows the hottest stars and star-forming regions. Hubble excels here.
The only band our eyes see. This is the human eye, the camera, and classic optical telescopes (VLT, Keck, ELT).
Pierces cosmic dust to see newborn stars and exoplanets. JWST’s specialty.
Our eye sees only a tiny band of the spectrum: between 400 and 700 nanometres (from violet to red). That is why telescopes were invented for every other wavelength, each instrument opening a new “colour” of the invisible universe.