Featured picture Choice of the week, "Laser towards the Milky Way". Despite the first impression of a still from a science-fiction movie, this extraordinary image is of recent cutting-edge research. It was taken in mid-August by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky at the high-altitude Paranal Observatory in Chile. The laser reaches 90 km into the Earth's mesosphere to form a reference point, enabling sharper observations of phenomena such as the giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
