San Pedro de Atacama- Star Gazing

By far the coolest night yet. We booked a tour which brought you out into th middle of the Atacama desert to a French astronomer´s house. His name is Alain Maury and even though myself and Enda had no great knowledeg of astronomy or the cosellations, it was such an interesting night. He had brilliant English and had great sense of sarcastic humour.

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We started by been led into their house (himself & his wife run the place together), which has no lights outside (clearly not good fro star gazing!). So we stumbled across the bumpy sand feeling infront of you trying not to bump into anything or fall! Then you go through the fron door and there is a wee table in centre of hall with a single candle lit on it. Surrounding this is a circular style concrert seating area. You take your place on the concrete slab & Alain sits in front of you and starts to explain few basics about using the telescopes outside (6 massive telescopes outside). Then Enda happened to look up....right above our heads there was a square section of the thatched roof missing! Peeping in on us all were about 3,500 stars and part of the Milky Way. (Because the weather is so dry there he can afford to cut out a chunk of his ceiling & leave it open! Actually alot of restaurant in San Pedro were the same...they had big square cut out of the ceiling, then in middle of restaurant they light huge fire of the floor & when yo finish your dinner you can sit around the ´bonefire´and drink your coffe or whatever. It was lovely idea...clearly would never work at home!)

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Anyway back to Alain, after he retired early from the European Southern Observatory, he set up his own private observatory on a ranch outside San Pedro, www.spaceobs.com. He combines astro-tourism with his own private research on comets and asteroids. He brough us out and showed us how the rotational relationship between the earth, stars and sun. I wont bore ye with the details, but if any of you are ever in San Pedro its a must. We got to see the Souther Sky (as opposed to our Northern sky at home) so got to set loads of ccol consellations like the southern cross , the bat, the soldier and the horse, the swan and so many more. He then went though the various names the Incas had for these consellations & the importance the stars played in their lives. The closest star to earth (after the sun) is called Alpha Sentario and when we looked up with the naked eye it was so bright. He then got us to look through the biggest telescope and it turned out its actually two stars side by side...it was menntal. The telescopes just showed up so much more than you could ever imagine seeing with the naked eye. Got to see three shooting stars too which was lovely, oh and we folled a satellite travelling through the sky. It took two hours in the freezing cold at 9pm but was so worth it. Then to finish off the night he brings you inside and recaps on stuff, and his wfe comes out with the best hot chocolate ever...her own mother makes it melting real chocolate in milk, it was gorgeous & was perfect warmer up to the end of the night.

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Due to there being no lights around we couldnt take any photos apart from one. Alain took your camera & attached it to one of the telescopes which he had focused in on Jupiter andd took photo. Our cameras are nothing like ones he uses (64million pixles as opposed to our 10.1million pixle) so the photo is not of astronomer quality but we hope ye can see it. There were 3 rings around it, which are blurry in our photo but look closely and you might make them out. Trev you would have loved it, wish you could have been there xoxox