TRAPPIST Sees a Tarantula

The star-spangled swirls of the Tarantula Nebula feature in one of the first pictures, released June 8, from a new remote control telescope.

TRAPPIST, or the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, sits at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla site in northern Chile. But it's operated from a control room in Liège, Belgium—about 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) away.

The telescope will look for planets outside our solar system by watching for periodic dips in a star's brightness as a planet passes in front of its host. A low amount of dust between Earth and the Tarantula make the nearby nebula a promising target for planet hunting, according to the TRAPPIST team.