Where should we go to see the sky from the Southern hemisphere? Australia, South America, the Canarias? The answer was in Sky & Telescope magazine. We signed up for a tour to Chile in March of 2017. The high, dry climate of the Andes makes an excellent location for telescopes, and there are numerous large professional observatories and smaller ones designed for tourists. We visited several of each kind. We visited four professional observatories during the day and had five nights of viewing at smaller tourist telescopes.
The Milky Way from the Southern Hemisphere
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory is located about 50 miles from La Serena, Chile. The 4 meter telescope that weighs 670 tons is mounted on twenty-five posts that float in oil. This unique construction has allowed it to survive three earthquakes over a magnitude of 8.4.
Evert noticed a Hartmann Mask similar to one he made and shows in this website's Turbulence Research menu. It is used to align a telescope's optics. Rather than use a conventional adaptive optics method that simultaneously samples all sub apertures, this sampling takes only a few seconds to average the effects of atmospheric turbulence and shows the telescopes optical alignment.
Evert noticed a Hartmann Mask similar to one he made and shows in this website's Turbulence Research menu. It is used to align a telescope's optics. Rather than use a conventional adaptive optics method that simultaneously samples all sub apertures, this sampling takes only a few seconds to average the effects of atmospheric turbulence and shows the telescopes optical alignment.
Gemini South is on Cerro Pachon near Cerro Tololo. It is the southern half of the Gemini Observatory, the northern half being located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The 8.1 meter telescope is operated by the U. S. Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Below is a view of the Gemini telescope.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) at Cerro La Silla is composed of 14 telescopes that are operated by a group of 16 European Countries. At 8,000 ft. elevation this is one of the driest and darkest places on Earth. By 2024 the Extremely Large Telescope at 39.3 meters will be in operation at La Silla.
This is one of the 66 radio dishes that comprise the Atacama Large Millimeter Array otherwise known as ALMA. The dishes are located at an elevation of 16,000 ft. on the Chajnantor Plateau. ALMA is run by an international partnership of American, European, and Asian countries. The 100 ton radar dishes can be placed in arrays of varying distances to create one large telescope.