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The only guests allowed in this place are doctors of astrophysics, Ph.D. students and lens engineers but, somehow, I've been granted a two-night stay. My expert guide is Olivier Hainaut, the ESO's affable pipe-smoking head of science operations, and a man entirely at home in his extreme surrounds. He takes me on a tour of the place.
If Explora's Hotel de Larache is a lavish aberration, then the ESO's hotel—Residencia—is a pure marvel. The whole building has been conceived to harmonize with the workings of both the observatory and the desert. To keep light pollution to an absolute minimum, architect Philipp Auer gave the building cannily sited screens and heavy doors, and fit each room with blackout blinds. "As a consequence," says Olivier, "the total light emitted by the whole building never exceeds that of a 100-watt light bulb."
Humidity, or the lack thereof, is a problem in the Atacama. The very factors that make the environment perfect for telescopes—no damp, no dust, strong dry winds—turn human skin to papyrus. So the lobby of the Residencia has been designed as an indoor jungle, with banana trees and palms sprouting from lush gardens around a linear pool. Humidity here is a comfortable 35 percent, in contrast to the five to 10 percent that is typical outside—and it can fall as low as one percent.
The likelihood of earthquakes also had to be factored in. Tremors occur daily, low-magnitude earthquakes are monthly events and every decade a shake measuring 8.5 on the Richter scale hits. Fiberglass mats anchoring the concrete structure to the ground absorb these seismic threats and, in the event of a major clash of the nearby tectonic plates, the ESO Residencia would simply float.
But most remarkable of all is that the ESO Residencia is invisible. Slotted into a valley, it hunkers down quietly, a simple block of straight lines embedded in the Atacama. Only the dome on the conservatory barely breaks the horizon, a subtle counterpoint to the concave mirrors that are the centerpieces and sense organs of the telescopes. And the views from inside, of baking desert and sensual hills framed by cool dark wood and metal, are as impressive as those from any beach resort or city hotel.
"This place is beautiful by day, but at night the show begins," Olivier whispers. "The astronomers go to work, the machines wake up and the sun sets—it's the time when we start to talk about the universe."
The VLT has a "seeing" potential one billion times more powerful than the human eye. So you could see an astronaut on the moon—if NASA sent people there anymore. "If you directed just one of the telescopes at the space shuttle, you'd see the pilot's face," Olivier says. Over lunch, he puts it another way: "If you pointed one of the mirrors at the sun by accident and there was an engineer nearby, he would be vaporized by the sudden influx of heat energy."
But Olivier's concerns are cosmological, not sensational. He enthuses about the discoveries made since the VLT was completed in September 2000: "We can look at distant supernovae—dying, exploding stars—and see not only that the universe is expanding, which we knew, but also that the rate of expansion is accelerating, which is completely new. We also have the first image of a planet orbiting another sun, an extra-solar planet. We can see all the way to the edge of the universe with any telescope. The difference is that with the VLT we can see detail and analyze the light. For astronomers, the VLT is a kind of paradise."
Olivier tells me I can go up "onto the platform," and when I go out there in the early evening, the temperature has dropped like a meteorite. Even with the penumbra of the sun still glowing fiercely, it is time to button up and hide from the wind. In a few hours it will hit freezing. In winter, 5 F is common.
Then the VLT is switched on, and something magical happens. First there is a whirring, and then huge doors slide open to reveal the telescope—first one, then another, until all the eyes are on the sky. The finely tuned machinery that keeps the telescopes alive—and powers the pistons that flex the mirrors to achieve optimal reflection—come into play. Then, all of a sudden, a button pressed in the underground lab redirects one of the telescopes. I follow its line of sight, wondering at what distant and obscure object it is directing its sophisticated technologies.
Another astronomer, Laura, joins me on the platform for the magic hour. "You can think of the VLT in two ways," she says. "In a sense, they are mirrors in aluminum sheds on top of a hill in the desert. But actually, it is the world's only time machine. The bigger these telescopes get, the further we can see in space and in time, and so we are traveling, by stealth, towards the Big Bang and the origins of the universe."
As the last remnants of the solar penumbra fade, a new light begins to brighten up the sky a few degrees to the south. At first it appears to be something like a Magellanic Cloud, those distant, sublime dwarf galaxies that shimmer beside our own Milky Way.
But this emerging light has a focus, a definite point at its base. Gradually, the glory of the McNaught Comet is draped over a corner of the sky. I try to imagine a missile of ice shedding its tail of fragments as it orbits towards oblivion. But from earth it is a tranquil thing—silent, static and, like our sun and planets, doomed to set as it drives through the universe. We rotate on into the small hours.
"It may not come back past earth," Olivier says, "even when it's supposed to, in 50,000 years. It's burning itself up as it flies, so this may be the last time human eyes will see it."
It is perhaps the contrast between the dead, dry desert and the liquid depths and lights of the universe that give the Atacama its magic. By day, the sun steals color from the land; but at night, the sky is a portal to the heavens. For those who can tap into the translating genius of the VLT, this means not just silver and blue and the cold fire of Venus, but teeming whorls of nebulae and the cataclysmic fission of a trillion stars. For us mere mortals, the sky over Atacama promises other worlds and reminds us that life unfolds and shimmers even where death seems to reign.
If Explora's Hotel de Larache is a lavish aberration, then the ESO's hotel—Residencia—is a pure marvel. The whole building has been conceived to harmonize with the workings of both the observatory and the desert. To keep light pollution to an absolute minimum, architect Philipp Auer gave the building cannily sited screens and heavy doors, and fit each room with blackout blinds. "As a consequence," says Olivier, "the total light emitted by the whole building never exceeds that of a 100-watt light bulb."
Humidity, or the lack thereof, is a problem in the Atacama. The very factors that make the environment perfect for telescopes—no damp, no dust, strong dry winds—turn human skin to papyrus. So the lobby of the Residencia has been designed as an indoor jungle, with banana trees and palms sprouting from lush gardens around a linear pool. Humidity here is a comfortable 35 percent, in contrast to the five to 10 percent that is typical outside—and it can fall as low as one percent.
The likelihood of earthquakes also had to be factored in. Tremors occur daily, low-magnitude earthquakes are monthly events and every decade a shake measuring 8.5 on the Richter scale hits. Fiberglass mats anchoring the concrete structure to the ground absorb these seismic threats and, in the event of a major clash of the nearby tectonic plates, the ESO Residencia would simply float.
But most remarkable of all is that the ESO Residencia is invisible. Slotted into a valley, it hunkers down quietly, a simple block of straight lines embedded in the Atacama. Only the dome on the conservatory barely breaks the horizon, a subtle counterpoint to the concave mirrors that are the centerpieces and sense organs of the telescopes. And the views from inside, of baking desert and sensual hills framed by cool dark wood and metal, are as impressive as those from any beach resort or city hotel.
"This place is beautiful by day, but at night the show begins," Olivier whispers. "The astronomers go to work, the machines wake up and the sun sets—it's the time when we start to talk about the universe."
The VLT has a "seeing" potential one billion times more powerful than the human eye. So you could see an astronaut on the moon—if NASA sent people there anymore. "If you directed just one of the telescopes at the space shuttle, you'd see the pilot's face," Olivier says. Over lunch, he puts it another way: "If you pointed one of the mirrors at the sun by accident and there was an engineer nearby, he would be vaporized by the sudden influx of heat energy."
But Olivier's concerns are cosmological, not sensational. He enthuses about the discoveries made since the VLT was completed in September 2000: "We can look at distant supernovae—dying, exploding stars—and see not only that the universe is expanding, which we knew, but also that the rate of expansion is accelerating, which is completely new. We also have the first image of a planet orbiting another sun, an extra-solar planet. We can see all the way to the edge of the universe with any telescope. The difference is that with the VLT we can see detail and analyze the light. For astronomers, the VLT is a kind of paradise."
Olivier tells me I can go up "onto the platform," and when I go out there in the early evening, the temperature has dropped like a meteorite. Even with the penumbra of the sun still glowing fiercely, it is time to button up and hide from the wind. In a few hours it will hit freezing. In winter, 5 F is common.
Then the VLT is switched on, and something magical happens. First there is a whirring, and then huge doors slide open to reveal the telescope—first one, then another, until all the eyes are on the sky. The finely tuned machinery that keeps the telescopes alive—and powers the pistons that flex the mirrors to achieve optimal reflection—come into play. Then, all of a sudden, a button pressed in the underground lab redirects one of the telescopes. I follow its line of sight, wondering at what distant and obscure object it is directing its sophisticated technologies.
Another astronomer, Laura, joins me on the platform for the magic hour. "You can think of the VLT in two ways," she says. "In a sense, they are mirrors in aluminum sheds on top of a hill in the desert. But actually, it is the world's only time machine. The bigger these telescopes get, the further we can see in space and in time, and so we are traveling, by stealth, towards the Big Bang and the origins of the universe."
As the last remnants of the solar penumbra fade, a new light begins to brighten up the sky a few degrees to the south. At first it appears to be something like a Magellanic Cloud, those distant, sublime dwarf galaxies that shimmer beside our own Milky Way.
But this emerging light has a focus, a definite point at its base. Gradually, the glory of the McNaught Comet is draped over a corner of the sky. I try to imagine a missile of ice shedding its tail of fragments as it orbits towards oblivion. But from earth it is a tranquil thing—silent, static and, like our sun and planets, doomed to set as it drives through the universe. We rotate on into the small hours.
"It may not come back past earth," Olivier says, "even when it's supposed to, in 50,000 years. It's burning itself up as it flies, so this may be the last time human eyes will see it."
It is perhaps the contrast between the dead, dry desert and the liquid depths and lights of the universe that give the Atacama its magic. By day, the sun steals color from the land; but at night, the sky is a portal to the heavens. For those who can tap into the translating genius of the VLT, this means not just silver and blue and the cold fire of Venus, but teeming whorls of nebulae and the cataclysmic fission of a trillion stars. For us mere mortals, the sky over Atacama promises other worlds and reminds us that life unfolds and shimmers even where death seems to reign.
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