European Southern Observatory - ESO

On Sunday we'd booked to visit La Silla Observatory, an impressive location with 16 telescopes part of ESO (European Southern Observatory), who set up an observatory here to benefit from some of the clearest night skies in the world.
Despite an early start, we really enjoyed the drive up from La Serena. The road was empty, and the views were stunning as we drove up towards the desert. We were surrounded by mountains of all colours, similar to the section of the Andes we'd seen near Aconcagua mountain in Argentina.
We ended up arriving early, but we didn't mind, as we spent the time being entertained by a very boisterous flock of parrots.
Eventually we got picked up by the observatory's bus, which took us the last 30 minutes up to 2,400m, to the peak of the mountain (La Silla, or "the chair", as it looks a bit like a saddle), which is where all the telescopes are.
The largest telescope was the first stop of the tour, and it was very impressive!
The main mission of the 3.6m telescope here has been finding exoplanets, celestial bodies like our Earth, orbiting around stars like the sun.
It has discovered thousands over the years, by measuring the gravitational pull that the planets have on the stars. Although we typically think about the gravitational pull our sun has on the Earth, Earth also pulls the sun, although only ever so slightly. As exoplanets rotate around their own stars, they also pull on them, making the star wobble with a rythm related to the planets orbit. The large telescope at La Silla detects this wobbling which is in the range of meters, (which is very impressive if you think about how distant and big these stars are, compared to their wobbling!).
The telescopes have a series of mirrors that allow them to capture light from the universe, they're so sensitive that cars are asked to not use their full beams, even in the car park at the bottom of the valley!
The two largest telescopes, both 3.6m wide, are avaliable for all members of the ESO, provided their research is for compelling enough science. The astronomer needs to convince the ESO board that their investigation is worth doing, competing with scientists from all over Europe to get the best nights sky.
Back in the day, astronomers would've had to travel all the way to La Silla, prepare little cards with coordinates on them, and give them to the operators to prepare the telescope for the night. Nowadays its all done online and astronomers only travel to La Silla if they're curious to see the telescopes in person.
The second telescope we saw was the 'NTT' (there were a lot of acronyms that day!).
NTT's (new technology telescope) refers to the telescopes mechanism, and how it points to the stars. With the NTT, the rotation of the telescope and its dome is achieved by a single mechanism, which rotates the entire building. We were told it was simpler, but it still looked incredibly complicated!
We also learnt about the ELT - extremely large telescope, being built further north in the desert. Ready in 2030, it will be 10x bigger than the biggest one at La Silla, nearly 40 meters across!
Needless to say, if you hadn't already gathered by the level of detail of this blog post, we loved the tour!
Afterwards, we kept on driving north to Huasco, which is in the middle of absolutely nowhere! We thought that Huasco would have probably looked much worse (as it was a bit grim) if it wasn't for the phenomenal sunset we witnessed as we pulled into our Airbnb's car park for the night.Les mer