During my stay in San Pedro de Atacama the full moon had given lots of great opportunities to party but threatened to take away from me something I had been eagerly looking forward to: stargazing in the desert. The driest place in the world, the Aacama Desert in Chile is one of the best places to view the stars due to the high altitude and lack of clouds and radio and light pollution.
I stayed an extra night and in close contact with a lovely lady from spaceobs.com and to my lucky surprise a day before I was due to leave got an email saying the observatory was open for business again. Granted the view wouldn't be brilliant due o the still bulging glare of the moon but I didn't care.
Huddled in a circle in the middle of the Aacama desert there was a small window of time between the sun going down an the moon coming up. Wrapped in blankets we were talked through some of the main stars, the constellations, how to find North an how and why our ancestors had planned their lives and belief systems around the stars. Fascinating.
Then we turned to the telescopes, huge beasts made for looking at the stars up close, through which I saw, to name a few, 'The Jewellry Box', a group of stars do named due to their differing colours of reds, blues and greens, the rings of Saturn and the craters of the moon which was utterly mesmerising. We shuffled about from telescope to telescope before congregating in the information hut for hot chocolates.
Many of the other stargazers asked intellectual questions and probed our guide on our he got into the business he was in and I felt a little stupid and kept quiet but seeing the milky white craters of the moon and feeling like a tiny creature staring up at the dark abyss of life out in space was worth the wait!
I stayed an extra night and in close contact with a lovely lady from spaceobs.com and to my lucky surprise a day before I was due to leave got an email saying the observatory was open for business again. Granted the view wouldn't be brilliant due o the still bulging glare of the moon but I didn't care.
Huddled in a circle in the middle of the Aacama desert there was a small window of time between the sun going down an the moon coming up. Wrapped in blankets we were talked through some of the main stars, the constellations, how to find North an how and why our ancestors had planned their lives and belief systems around the stars. Fascinating.
Then we turned to the telescopes, huge beasts made for looking at the stars up close, through which I saw, to name a few, 'The Jewellry Box', a group of stars do named due to their differing colours of reds, blues and greens, the rings of Saturn and the craters of the moon which was utterly mesmerising. We shuffled about from telescope to telescope before congregating in the information hut for hot chocolates.
Many of the other stargazers asked intellectual questions and probed our guide on our he got into the business he was in and I felt a little stupid and kept quiet but seeing the milky white craters of the moon and feeling like a tiny creature staring up at the dark abyss of life out in space was worth the wait!
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