The Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) telescope is one of the newest telescopes that allows us to get 3D views of the universe. MUSE is installed on the European Southern Obserbatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. It took over a decade to design and develop it but finally went online in March of 2014 and captured a string of incredible images, one of which is pictured above. In the picture above, you can see that there is blue light on the left, and red on the right. This is because MUSE has split the light from each part of this galaxy into component colors to show the chemical and physical properties of each point. In order to accomplish this, the telescope uses 24 spectrographs to split the galaxy’s light into its spectra which then allows it to assemble images and spectra of different regions in the sky. As we talked about in class, the studies of these spectra can tell us about the composition and movements of any object in the sky.
