By Dylan Kelemen
Space is a place humans can observe from a distance on our tiny planet called Earth. (OK, fine, it’s big.) A lot of astronomers travel to the Atacama Desert of Chile because there are clear skies and it gets exceptionally dark at night. Perfect for viewing the night sky. This is why A.L.M.A. was built in such a location. A.L.M.A. includes both a place where special telescopes are made, and an observatory with an array of telescopes 15 kilometers across! Too bad it’s only for scientists.
We arrived in San Pedro de Atacama on Sunday, September 13th and had plans to observe outer space in this very special place. As ten o’clock (pm) rolled around, we headed out of our hotel to pick up our bus. The bus took us to an area outside of town where nine telescopes were set up to view various objects in outer space. As we left the bus we met out tour guide astronomer named Les. He gave us a great lecture on constellations and other objects in space using a laser pointer that could precisely pinpoint what he was highlighting. In his lecture, he informed us about some amazing facts while making some cheesy astronomer jokes. Here’s a good one: “I was up all night wondering where the Sun had gone… then it dawned on me.” Something he joked about was that he is Canadian and had just moved to Chile because in Canada there were 300 cloudy nights, and in his first year in Chile there were 340 clear nights.
We also saw a ton of shooting stars, and Les told us that out in the Atacama there are about 10 shooting stars an hour. Shooting stars are bits of rock that burn up in the atmosphere, and most of them are the size of pebbles, but occasionally the shooting stars are bigger. There are others that are HUGE, and when those hit Earth’s surface, they wipe out the entire population of the world. Like what happened to the dinosaurs. If there is ever a huge meteor coming your way, don’t run. Take a selfie and post it on instagram or Facebook because it will be the last thing you’ll ever do. #I’mabouttodie
One thing I learned is that the sun, moon, other planets and constellations of the zodiac all rotate around earth in one band. Les showed us the band and pointed out the different constellations. He named a few constellations and pointed his laser at the ground (!) indicating that those constellations were on the other side of the Earth’s night sky.
Les did a great job of teaching the group about the different constellations in the zodiac and how different cultures see them and interpret them. The best story he told us was about Scorpio. Scorpio is one of the easiest constellations to see in the night sky and also the biggest that we observed without “hallucinating” a bit. There were some huge constellations that were bigger than Scorpio, but you had to use your imagination a lot to see how the stars connected up into a picture. Scorpio is very easy to see. At night. OBVIOUSLY. It looks like a regular scorpion with its head and pincers in the front. You can see the enormous tail reaching up into the sky.
What pictures would you see in these same stars in another part of the world? In New Zealand, would you EVER find a wild scorpion? No. That is why the Maori looked at the stars and saw a fishhook (the tail) instead of a scorpion. They had no idea what a scorpion was, and they were also fisher-people. So they named that constellation Fish Hook and used it in their creation story. The story was that their god had taken the fishhook, put a drop of his own blood on it and tossed it into the sea. As legend tells, that hook caught a fish bigger than any fish humans have ever seen before, and that fish became the north island of New Zealand.
Once the lecture was over, Les took us to nine different telescopes pointed at different objects in space, some “near” and some really, really, REALLY far. One of these telescopes is the largest telescope open to the public in South America, and it was pointed to a star cluster above the Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies that might be orbiting the Milky Way. Another telescope was pointed to view the great planet of Saturn with its many rings. My favorite was seeing a white dwarf (a dead star) that had emitted a visible veil of gas and dust fogging out the surrounding stars. At the end of the tour, we circled up to drink hot chocolate, tea, or coffee, and ask Les any questions we had. What do you call an alien with three eyes? An Aliiien!
White dwarf – A dead star – http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/NatSci102/images/sun_whit.gif
Magellanic Clouds – Irregular dwarf galaxies – http://www.asnsw.com/sites/default/files/karenw/photos/images/txh-magellanic.jpg
