| It's cold, it's dry, the air is thin. The nearest city is miles away across a barren landscape of boulder-strewn hills. At night, the only lights to guide you are the stars in the sky. Astronomers, welcome to paradise. Known as the driest place on Earth, Chile's Atacama Desert has long been recognized as an ideal spot for ground-based telescopes. The skies are free of light pollution, and the high plains enjoy long stretches of steady atmospheric conditions, allowing astronomers to peer deeply into the cosmos without having to worry about turbulence distorting the data. (Related blog: "The Dry Edge of Life—Studying 'Martians' in Chile.") In the new time-lapse movie above, photographers Christoph Malin and Babak Tafreshi (founder of The World at Night, or TWAN, program) offer a rarely seen glimpse of Cerro Paranal, one of the high hills in the Atacama that houses instruments for the European Southern Observatory(ESO). Made by invitation from the ESO, the video includes more than 7500 still images taken between October and November 2011. It shows the beauty of the dark Atacama skies, sometimes framed by the four main domes of the Very Large Telescope, as well as a brief "behind the scenes" look at what telescope operators see from inside one of the domes. In an email to National Geographic, Tafreshi says of the Atacama: There are not many locations left on this planet where you can still experience a dark sky like this. I have been to similar dark skies in other continents ... |
