A surprising connection between modern astronomy and ancient culture in Chile...

La Silla is in the southern part of the Atacama - 600km north of Santiago and (don't we know it) at an altitude of 2400m! It is the home of ESO's original observing site. Today we visit the “grandfather of La Silla” the 3.6m telescope. A behemoth of an instrument standing proudly in its dome, the thing that gets me is the emptiness of the facility, here there are no humans, its completely remotely operated from afar, the real secret of his however is what lies beneath, the High Accuracy Radial velocity PlanetSearcher (HARPS). This telescope looks for other worlds out there in the cosmos…WOW! And it finds them too. I recall the night before, when Mattaeus tells me about his research into looking for new planets. Extrasolar planets were once thought to be very rare but now we believe most stars have planets around them formed from the accretion disc of dust and gas that gives birth to new stars.

HARPS
http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps.html

NTT next: the New Technology Telescope. This was the instrument that Veronica, the night previously was using to observe the pulsating star in Omega Centauri. NTT was a forerunner for the VLT: at 3.4 m in aperture it is so beautiful, mounted Alt-Az. The whole observatory turns with the telescope and can access all of the sky, attached to it is SOFI Son Of Issac (you can google that)! 

The NTT

We filmed MORE and took MORE pictures: it was stunning. See for yourself - what a beautiful, scuptural instrumet the NTT is! And then I saw a Condor! I exclaimed, “WHAT is that?!” - this bird was enormous, Hernan tells me it has a 3m wingspan! It just floated, almost suspended in mid-air, effortlessly gliding through the sky.

I thought that this was it - the day done, time to set off on our epic 900 km journey north to the centre of the universe (to me): Paranal Very Large Telescope (VLT). I was wrong, Hernan had been telling me all day about some petroglyphs that had been located here, an ancient reminder of civilisations past. He tells me it will take 1 hour to set off and see this relic of Chile, so I agree and off we go. I ride with him in his jeep across a wild track with rocks and dust strewn all around. The excitement builds: you see, Hernan is a real gentleman and an incredible host for me, talking passionately about what we are about to see, talking about the El Moya, an ancient civilisation that lived in the Andes before their extinction.

The Lama Nebula over La Silla - WOW!
(I didn't take this one sadly, it's one of ESO's images)
Amazing to think the El Moya saw it too...

Hernan took me to a sacred and ancient place, where scattered around the hillsides are petroglyphs. On them the ancient carvings from this now extinct race of people, showing an intimate relationship between them and the sky. Hernan showed me how they interpreted the carvings as representative of how they saw the sky and what it represented. I mentioned in a previous post the nebulous constellation the “Lama” and now Hernan told me about the stories... a sacred animal to the El Moya, they saw the Lama in the sky as an area we now know to be absorption, dust and gas in the milky way. To the El Moya this was a sign that beyond the earth was another realm and in it was the lama. 

To see some of what I saw, watch this INCREDIBLE timelapse by Stephane Guisard (and try not to cry... the YouTube version on the left isn't as high resolution as the link). They inscribed into the rocks the small and the large magellanic clouds, but they were separated from the rest of the carvings, as if they knew the objects were farther away in the sky. I had a sensed of real connection between the modern science and the El Moya, they were the original astronomers in Chile...