VISTA, Infrared survey telescope at Paranal Observatory, Chile

VISTA is a wide-field reflecting telescope with a 4.1-metre primary mirror at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, run by the European Southern Observatory. Its single instrument from 2009 to 2023 was VIRCAM, a 3-tonne infrared camera holding 16 detectors with 67 million pixels combined. A 4MOST spectrograph with 2436 movable fibre-optic spines was installed in 2024-25.

The telescope was developed by 18 British universities under Queen Mary University of London's leadership. In 2009 it was transferred to the European Southern Observatory, which has operated it since then.

VISTA's name stands for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, though its surveys work at near-infrared wavelengths. Its data are public: all datasets from the 2010-2017 surveys, including UltraVISTA and VVV, are available through the ESO archive, and astronomers use them to study subjects from dark energy to near-Earth asteroids.

VISTA stands on a secondary peak about 1,500 m from the Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory, at roughly 2,600 m altitude in Chile's Atacama Desert. It is a working ESO research facility, not a visitor site, so access is not open to tourists; the telescope is operated remotely and its data are released through the ESO archive.

VIRCAM, VISTA's only instrument from 2009 to 2023, is a 3-tonne camera holding 16 infrared detectors with 67 million pixels in total. Each VISTA image covers about ten times the area of the full Moon, and the telescope reaches a sensitivity forty times greater than the earlier Two Micron All-Sky Survey.