The large mirror, wide field of view and very sensitive infrared detectors of ESO's 4.1-metre Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) make it by far the best tool for this job.
Even though the suite of instruments for the E-ELT has yet to be finalized, ESO astronomer Joe Liske says the telescope will make observing time for cosmology, nearby galaxies, solar system studies and the burgeoning list of planets now known to circle other stars.
To its credit, ESO has successfully made this landscape continue to work for the kinds of large-scale astronomical projects which have become its hallmark.
That's exactly what the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile did recently with its brand new VLT Survey Telescope -- just a portion of the resulting inaugural image is shown above.
This isn't the first time the ESO has shown a love for large captures: it managed to stitch together a massive 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way out of thousands of photographs taken with its VISTA telescope earlier this fall.
The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey is an ESO public survey dedicated to scanning the southern plane and bulge of the Milky Way through five near-infrared filters.