I had arrived late in the night, so I had not seen anything of Calama. I got up with curiosity thinking “Let’s see where we are today”. It turned out that Calama was not special at all. Another mining town aligned along a checker maze. Getting organized turned out to be a more tardy than usual — apparently, the language barrier was higher than usual. By the time I had sorted it out, the bus was to San Pedro de Atacama was gone. Luckily, I had factored in enough contingency into my planing to arrive in San Pedro just in time to join the star gazing tour. I had read about the star tours about 1,5 years back in a journal article, and sort of kept it in the back of my mind with the resolution “whenever I get to San Pedro, I will go star gazing”.
To avoid light contamination, the star tours take place outside of San Pedro. After an introduction into the Southern night sky, we were led to a farm of telescopes, each of them pointing at different objects in the sky. We could freely walk around from telescope to telescope as we pleased. Later on, there was a question and answer session with Alain, the founder of the enterprise. He used to work as a professional astronomer for ESO, and decided to opt for a second life. Well, one could see that he enjoyed himself answering questions about the universe… Thanks for the gorgeous pictures of the moon, Alain — next time, I will want one from Saturn 🙂
