 ESO is a success story, and there is plenty of evidence for this. First and most important, ESO delivers highest quality astronomical data to the astronomers in the member states who beat in fierce competition to get observing nights. ESO's facilities are populated with the most advanced instrumentation that is very often built in cooperation with institutions in the member states. And last but not least, ESO is the European Forum where important decisions about ground-based astronomy are discussed, adopted and even implemented. Welcome in Germany! It's a great pleasure for me to have you here for the very special anniversary. ESO is a worldwide leading and certainly most productive institution for ground-based astronomical research. Dear ESO staff, 50 years of working together to uncover the mysteries and secrets of our universe, I congratulate you on that. With courage, passion and perseverance, you make it possible to further astronomical research. I had the chance to observe my own data and now with the very large telescope. And the object of my PhD thesis was this beautiful nearby galaxy, Centaurus A. And it's a special galaxy. You see this diffuse light is an elliptical galaxy and this dust plane that you're spanning across the center is the product of a spiral, it's a leftover of a spiral galaxy that was merging with this galaxy. So it's a special object and I wanted to accurately measure the black hole mass that is sitting inside there. In 1994, my colleagues and I formed the high-regional supernova team, a collection of astronomers interested in exploding stars wanting to take advantage of the opportunity to use Type 1A supernovae to measure the change in the expansion rate of the universe. We took our first data in 1995, but finding supernovae was not as easy a task as I hoped. We suddenly found an object at the last possible moment. This object looked like a supernova, but the important confirming spectrum evaded us. Without this spectrum, we would never know if this object was what we were looking for. Our last chance was with Bruno Leibengut and Jason Spiromelio, ESO staff members, who were on the NTT and through the great image quality of that telescope and the amazing persistence of these two astronomers, a spectrum was obtained revealing this as the most distant supernovae then detected. The high-Z supernova search was saved and ESO facilities continued to play pivotal role over the next three years in our program to discover the accelerating universe in 1998. Those same facilities continued to this day our discoveries and our investigations of what we think we call dark energy, which seems to be causing this acceleration. I do not just see that the future of astronomy is bright at ESO, rather I see that the future of astronomy is ESO. ESO is an excellent example of the benefits of collaboration, but we should not forget the advantages of healthy competition. Examples indeed include the discovery of the accelerating universe and the two teams, the search for exoplanets and the irrefutable evidence for a giant black hole in the center of the Milky Way. In all cases, there has been intense but fruitful competition between teams using different ground-based telescopes and instruments. This allowed the teams to get to the scientific results sooner, to have their conclusions accepted by the community sooner and was also very beneficial for pushing the observatories involved to stay at the leading edge, so we all win by this competition. And for these reasons it's my firm belief that ESO should not become what you might call a world lab where a few giant teams carry out just a couple experiments. The universe is ours to discover and there is so much still to do.