ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut meditates on the La Silla observatory at sunset, smoking his iconic pipe. La Silla was ESO's first observatory and is home for the 3.6-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT). The NTT broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror (known as active optics), a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world's large telescopes.