The European Southern Observatory (ESO, officially called the "European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere"), is a research group for astronomy, made up of fourteen countries from Europe. Made in 1962 to give state-of-the-art facilities and a view the Southern Sky to European astronomers, it is well known for using some of the largest and most advanced telescopes in the world, such as the New Technology Telescope (NTT), the telescope that helped create active optics technology, and the VLT (Very Large Telescope), made of four 8-meter class telescopes and four 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes.