"Looking Up" is the second special episode of this series and ESOcast 42 overall. In it we look at how, over the past fifty years, ESO has helped to unravel some of the mysteries of the Universe in which we live. Astronomers were in need of more powerful tools to observe the sky and ESO provided them. A new generation of revolutionary ground-based telescopes has offered astronomers a front-row seat to study the wonders of the Universe. From the relative proximity of the planets in our Solar System to very distant galaxies, some of which are seen soon after the Universe was born, almost fourteen billion years ago, ESO’s telescopes and advanced instrumentation are allowing astronomers to peer deeper into space than ever before.