Why here

Dry air, high ground, stable weather and almost no light pollution. That combination is why astronomers built ALMA on the Chajnantor plateau and the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, both in the Atacama.

The first night

Give your eyes twenty minutes without a phone screen. The Milky Way appears first as a cloud, then as a river with dark lanes of dust. In winter its centre passes right overhead. The two Magellanic Clouds, galaxies of their own, sit low in the south.

With the telescope

Saturn’s rings, the Jewel Box cluster, the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The astronomer will find them; you will not forget them.