Here you are inside the "J.Stock" Telescope at the National Observatory in Mérida, Venezuela. This is a Schmidt type telescope, basically a wide field telescope that makes it possible to take a "sky panorama". In driftscan mode you can get a "pano" two degrees wide by long as you have clear sky over your head. The main view is the CCD camera, an array of 16 CCDs that give a resolution of 64 megapixels, one of the biggest arrays of CCDs for use in astronomy in the world. Just in front of it is the mirror of the telescope with its 6 petals open. The three black pipes (runing from the mirror towards the camera) are Invar bars: they help to keep the focal plane between the camera and the telescope always parallel. If the temperature changes and the shape of the mirror changes, the camera moves in the same way. The silver pipes drive the cooling liquid to cool down the CCDs: they must work below -80° Celsius (-176° Fahrenheit) to keep the signal noise down.