Looking up from Chile’s arid Atacama Desert, home to some of the clearest starscapes on Earth, a massive new telescope has taken its first breathtaking photos of the southern night sky.

The VLT Survey Telescope, or VST, uses a 268-megapixel camera. Over the next five years it will capture 150 terabytes worth of visible-light data, supplement existing surveys and help astronomers study the universe in fresh detail.

On June 8, astronomers released the first two VST images. One is a 660-megabyte portrait of the Swan Nebula (above). The other is an equally detailed shot of Omega Centauri, a star-rich globular cluster sometimes called the jewel of the southern night sky.

In this gallery we’ll show you the telescope and what it took to create these colossal space photos.

Image: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM [high-resolution version available]