Seeing stars

We arrived early morning in La Serena and after sitting around for 2 hours in a coffee shop at the bus station finally were allowed into our guesthouse and contrary to our plans fell asleep. Waking up sometime in the afternoon we decided this might be a good chance to go stargazing. The area around La Serena has one of the greatest views of the sky. In fact, allowing other nations to put up telescopes is a lucrative industry for Chile.
Around Serena there are several, the smaller and older ones being named after famous astronomers, the bigger and newer have as inspired names as "European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT)". Chile actually changed all the streetlights from Santiago to San Pedro de Atacama to avoid light pollution in the sky. They also have to build roads just for the transport of the extremely large mirrors (E-ELT is 42m in diameter!).
But next to money, the Chilean scientific community also benefits by getting one night a months free access to the observatory. Considering that waiting lists are long and fees are high, this is a sweet deal for them.
Lucky chile and their pretty stars.
So what did we see? The southern cross and other constellations(theoretically I should never get lost again in this hemisphere). Starclusters (looks like a star to the naked eye and are millions of stars through he telescope), Saturn (which looks like a white dot with a white ring around it, like a childs drawing) and of course the moon:



This picture was taken by Erin holding the lens of her iPhone to the eyepiece of the telescope

We like the moon!

Random moon fact (As far as I remember):
The moon used to be closer to earth, like filling up the whole sky close, and it is moving away from earth.
Once it is too far from the earth's gravitational field it will stop orbiting earth, which means it will only be visible from certain areas. As the moon has a big effect on the earth's orbit around the sun, bad things will happen once it is gone.
But maybe by then we will live on Mars.

Random geek fact:
It has been considered as unlikely that a class M planet (like earth) exists in a twin star system. But Tatooine has recently been found!
Though no aliens in pajamas fighting with laser swords...