Atacama Desert

Our bandwidth is severely limited given how remote the mountains are where we are staying. So I can’t send the Choquequirao and Machu Picchu videos I was hoping to get out. But I am hoping I can send these few pictures today. We are just outside the small down of Vicuña adjacent to the Atacama Desert which makes these mountains home to some of the world’s best and most powerful observatories, including Cerro Tololo. I tried to capture this picture of it on a far mountain as the mist cleared at sunrise this morning. When the sun sets at night the skies come alive with stars and we are spending our nights enjoying the show. An app called Stellarium allows you see see the night sky and identify what you see. This screenshot is an example what we saw as we looked at the stargazing sign for Capricorn. When I get more bandwidth I’ll send more.

Vicuña

Our last evening in Vicuña we decided to get an even better view of the night sky and arranged to meet with Victor and Lincoln Alvarez who bounced us and a handful of other stargazers through the mountains to a spit of flat rock where they had set up a motorized 14 inch telescope. The starlight was magnificent and we took close looks at the Tarantula Nebula more the 1000 light years in diameter, Orion’s Belt (the middle star is really a nebula), Saturn, Jupiter, the brightest star in the sky-Sirius, a baby at 250 million years old and, course, the moon. See it all is humbling and resets your view of life and the world. Thanks to ElkiMagic.com for setting it up. These images were made available using the the Stellarium App. If you like Stargazing you can down load it from the Apple App Store for free.

Travel Recommendations for Vicuna and the Atacama