20 May 2021
ESO observatories operated under challenging conditions in 2020 due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, having to reduce and even pause scientific observations for a few months. Nonetheless, 2020 was still a very productive year for the observatory with regard to the number of papers that were published using data from ESO telescopes, mostly obtained in previous years. A recently published report from the ESO library shows that 2020 represents the fourth consecutive year that over 1000 scientific studies using ESO data were published.
Of the 608 studies carried out using observations from the VLT and VLTI, 336 (55%) used data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), the Ultraviolet-Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES), or from the X-shooter spectrograph. These were the three most productive VLT instruments in 2020, as was the case in 2019.