Before I moved to Chile, I had never really given the stars much thought. I grew up in the middle of England, where the skies were either grey because of rain clouds or glowed orange at night thanks to sodium street lamps. I knew the same small handful of constellations that everyone else did and not a lot more.
That changed when I moved to San Pedro de Atacama, the small town in the heart of Chile’s Atacama Desert. It was here that I fell in love with astronomy. How could I not? The dark skies here are the best in the world for stargazing, with air so clear that we have more than 70% of the most advanced observatories in the world. And it’s not just scientists who come here. Astrotourism is a big draw in the Atacama Desert, and I quickly knew that I wanted to put my passion to work as a guide to the desert night sky.
Discovering the night sky
I arrived in San Pedro seven years ago to train as a tour guide at Explora Atacama. The course involved learning how to lead activities like mountain biking, mountaineering, horseback riding, and naturalist excursions. But the final unit of the rigorous four-month program was about astronomy – and it changed everything for me.
We had the great privilege of learning from Massimo Tarenghi, the former director of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the largest radio telescope in the world. It was part of a group of observatories, dubbed the Event Horizon Telescope, that collectively captured the first ever image of a black hole in 2019. ALMA also happened to be less than 60km (35 miles) from my new home.
Massimo was an inspiration. His passion and expertise were contagious, and from that one course I was completely captured by astronomy. As I developed as a guide, I decided to specialise more and more in astronomy. It became a hobby and then a passion, to the point today where I decided to make astrotourism the pure focus of my work.
An astronomy paradise
It was all a happy accident. I hadn’t realised it at the time, but the things that drew me to the Atacama Desert were exactly the same factors that drew astronomers like Massimo to work here, and spend millions of dollars on cutting edge telescopes.
The weather was a start. Those overcast skies of my English youth obviously blocked out the sky and made the days dreary and the nights starless, but there was something else I hadn’t realised. Water droplets in the air cause light to scatter, so even on a clear night, the pure dampness of the climate is a problem for starlight, which is thin and delicate after travelling unimaginable light years to get to Earth. Moving to one of the driest spots on the planet for a bit of sunshine might have felt extreme, but it was the key to unlocking the night sky.
On top of that, we’re that little bit closer to the stars here. San Pedro de Atacama sits at about 2400 meters (7840 feet) above sea level and other parts of the desert are higher still. That means a thinner atmosphere – something I always catch my breath at after returning from a trip away – but also that the views become even more extraordinary when you look up at night, in a sky that’s also free from light pollution. With conditions like this, it was almost inevitable that I would become an astronomy guide.
Indigenous star stories
Thanks to training with Massimo, my approach to the stars started off from a firm scientific base. But living somewhere that’s been inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years, I soon became fascinated by the cosmologies of the indigenous Atacameño people. They turned almost everything I knew on its head.
Like almost everyone, I grew up thinking of the stars as forming a series of constellations: bright points of light that can be joined together to form shapes and tell stories, from Greek and Roman myths to Eastern zodiacs. But the first inhabitants of the Atacama Desert looked at the sky in a different way. They looked at the gaps between the stars.
It’s a hard concept to grab at first. If you’re from an urban area like me, it’s possible that you’ve never really seen the Milky Way, but out in the Atacama Desert, this river of stars completely dominates the sky with its astonishing brightness. And when you get used to the stars like the Atacameños did, you start to learn the silhouettes in the Milky Way where there aren’t any stars – and these are what the people here used as constellations.
One of my favourite examples is Yakana, a huge dark area that forms the shape of a llama. They’re the most important domestic animal in the Andes and one I’m used to seeing in San Pedro. As the night sky wheels high above and the Milky Way dips below the horizon, the llama lowers its head to dip it into the distant ocean. As Yakana drinks its waters, so it protects the farmers from flooding. Yakana is really impressive when you see it for the first time. It’s so big that it covers most of the sky, dominating the Milky Way – most people don’t even know it’s there until you point it out to them, but once you’ve seen it, it’s unmissable.
The year in the sky
One of the joys of having a view of an almost infinite universe on your doorstep is getting to see how it changes throughout the year.
One of my favourite features about the night sky in the Atacama Desert is that throughout the summer months you can see all the planets lined up. In a single night, I can see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn practically in a row. With those clear skies, even Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s sharp rings come into sharp relief (I started out with a pair of standard binoculars that had 8x magnification, but for my tours I now get to show off with a Meade telescope that has a 40cm or 16 inch mirror to gather light, giving you about 700x magnification – and a truly dizzying view into the heavens).
In winter, I head out of the solar system for some deep space astronomy, looking into the heart of the Milky Way and beyond. There are galaxies here that can’t be seen in the northern hemisphere, and they boggle my mind each time I catch them in my viewfinder. The Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud are just diffused patches of light really, but that light has taken 200,000 light years to reach us. You can see them with the naked eye, looking far back into the past to a time that even predates Homo sapiens.
With a telescope you can see even further back. The most distant and ancient object I’ve seen (and been able to photograph) is the Sombrero Galaxy, which sits a truly staggering 28 million light years away. It’s a number that gives me vertigo.
My astronomy journey
As I’ve spent time looking up at the night sky here and sharing it with others, one thing I’ve learned is a better understanding of the natural world. I only had the most cursory understanding of subjects like geology and biology, but astronomy has allowed me to connect all the dots. Looking into deep time, I truly understand what Carl Sagan meant when he said that the cosmos is within us because we are all made of star-stuff. Astronomy is the first and oldest science, after all, stretching from the first communities who looked up to interpret their world through stories, to the modern technologies that allow us to see billions of years into the past. The Atacama Desert couldn’t have taught me a better lesson.
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