It stretches from the arid Atacama Desert in the north to the stark granite formations of the Torres del Paine National Park in the south. A narrow strip of land, 2,700 miles long and 217 miles at its widest point, Chile is tucked between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Pacific to the west.
Most people are hard-pressed to recognize even the most familiar constellations, and they’ve never seen the Milky Way. Yes, the moon is visible at times, and maybe you can see a bright planet like Venus every now and then, but that’s about it. If you live in a city, as I do, you probably don’t notice the night sky at all. If there’s one country in the world that really deserves stellar status, it’s Chile.
It is home to some of the finest places on Earth to enjoy the beauty of the starry sky. The country is justly famous for its lush valleys and snowcapped volcanoes, but its most striking scenery may be overhead. There’s just too much to see.Ĭhile is an astronomer’s paradise. “To the naked eye, it looks like a fuzzy star, but the telescope reveals its true nature: a huge, globular cluster of hundreds of thousands of stars, almost 16,000 light-years away.” I could take in this mesmerizing view for hours, but Maury’s other telescopes are trained at yet more cosmic wonders. “This is Omega Centauri,” says astronomer Alain Maury, who runs a popular tourist observatory just south of San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile.
Like tiny diamonds on black velvet, countless sparkling stars float against a fathomless backdrop of empty space. The view through the eyepiece of the telescope is breathtaking.
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