After a long overnight journey, which followed a sleepless night in Santiago, you would imagine, given my love of sleep, that i would have been tucked up in my bed nice and early and headed to the land of nod.
Not so. In fact, our sole purpose for making the long trip north was to head out to the muddle of the night. Why? Why else, to watch the stars.
Space Observations is a small company established by a French Astronomer and his wife, a tourism operator. They spotted a niche in the market and ever since have been taking tourists out into the Atacama Desert to observe the stunning southern night sky. The region’s impossibly clear skies coupled with the almost total lack of light pollution provide for a truly incredible experience.
Even with the naked eye, we could see the cloudy band which ran from the horizon in the north arching overhead and descending towards the southern horizon, our home – the milky way.
Alejandra and Alain explained to us how we might orient ourselves using the southern or indeed northern skies; why the viewing experience here in the Atacama desert is so different; why and which portions of the sky are shared between northern and southern hemispheres and which stars we can never hope to see back home at our lofty 53 degrees north.
They pointed out Alpha-centauri, one of the brightest stars in the sky and our nearest neighbour, a mere 4.4 light years away. Explaining the concept of this distance, Alain informed us, that if we had astronauts at alpha centauri and we wanted to communicate with them, we could send them a message, which travelling at the speed of light would take 4.4 years to reach him. His response would take the same time to return, so we would know, 8.8 years after sending our initial message, that the astronaut was fine, alive and well 4.4 years ago! He pointed out some equally bright stars and explained that the brightness does not necessarily relate to distance, with two equally bright stars being 26 light years and 3000 light years away!
We tried to familiarise ourselves with some well known constellations: the southern cross, the scorpion, the pointers and a few less obvious ones such as Aquarius and Pegasus, which required a greater degree of imagination tor some mind altering substance to observe. We finished off the evening with a stunning climax – viewing this incredible tapestry of light through some powerful telescopes. We could see clusters of stars which to the naked eye appeared to be a cloud. Two stars, one red and one blue, which appear to be one without the telescope. We saw the milky way, far off galaxies and supernova remnants. The star of the show, ironically, not even a star, was one of our closest planetary neighbours, Jupiter with its moons and coloured bands.
A well earned night’s sleep followed and Saturday left us a free day before we boarded our bus to Arica – our final Chilean destination before we left for Bolivia.
San Pedro de Atacama is a town thriving on tourism. Every second shop is a tour operator and every other a gift or souvenir shop. As you walk down the dusty streets, waiters try to lure you into their restaurants with their Latin charm. I should have hated it.
I loved it.
Its gorgeous, its welcoming, its colourful, its friendly. About 3 blocks by four or five, it is a tiny place and yet we wandered contentedly for six or seven hours, browsing shops, taking photos, sipping cool drinks shaded from the desert heat. I was sorry to be leaving so soon. With a host of tours and activities on offer, it is not difficult to see why one might stay in this little oasis longer than originally planned. As they say though, time waits for no one and unfortunately, we were no exception. So as I write, I am sitting on the bus once again, for another overnight journey, heading for La Paz and the next leg of the journey.
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