San Pedro de Atacama

Friday, May 2, - Day 136

I got up early and walked around.

As with all cities in Latin and South America, there’s a church on the plaza in the center of town. Nobody knows when this church was built, but the first recorded mention of it was in 1745, and it was already in service. So it is really, really old. And it’s made of mud. How can that be? Well, I’m in the northern part of the Atacama Desert, which is one of the driest placed on Earth. Some of the areas here have never recorded any rainfall. Ever. The adobe walls to the church are over 5 feet thick. And while the exterior roof has been replaced, though replaced with mud, the interior, for the most part, remains made of the original timbers.

I went on an amazing astronomy tour this evening. It was all in Spanish, and once again, I was the only one from the US. The guy that runs the operation, though, used to work at the Palomar Observatory and lived in Escondido. He’s got a great set-up about 6 km south of town with 8 different telescopes of various sizes. Saw some amazing things, and he did a great job of describing the cosmos. Each telescope was focused on a different object, so you could just walk around chose what you wanted to see. With no moon, the timing was perfect. The sky was incredibly dark, and the black clouds in the Milky Way were as pronounced as I’ve ever seen.

We saw a couple of satellites, which are always cool, 5 shooting stars, all of the visible zodiac constellations, some stunning southern hemisphere globular clusters and nebulae, and a couple of nice deep-space galaxies. This was a much better tour than the public tour at Mammalluca, and was exactly what I was hoping for.