Sunday 19th October – Socos to Vicuna
We left Socos and continued North. There´s a pattern emerging here for the more astute of you! when we got to Vicuna we instantly fell in love with the beautiful town with a lovely leafy square in the middle. The town is along the Elqui valley which, along with producing some great Chilean wine, makes for a stunning drive. In the town itself we looked around several artisan type places before having lunch. One of the draws of the area is the observatories which Chile is famous for. Aswell as having a great climate and low light pollution for visibility, it also has the Andes which, strangely enough being quite high, are great for star gazing! So we headed to the town observatory where we had read we could do a bit of a Patrick Moore. When we got there it was closed but on the way back there was a sign to a campsite. Slightly tongue in cheek we drove up the stony road, only to be very pleasantly surprised by the most lovely, deserted hillside campsite with a beautiful pool. We checked in and headed back into town to buy tickets for the observatory on the advice of the owner of the campsite.
Once back in town the observatory was shut. When we asked (that´s the Royal We here you understand which normally means my Mum, occasionally my Dad and rarely to never me) when the ticket office would be open. In typical Chilean style the random passerby we asked phoned to check for us and then informed us that we could wait for the person.
Tickets in hand we headed back to the campsite where we relaxed and ate dinner before heading to the observatory. When we got there we were told we were the only English group so we had a guide to ourselves. The tour started with the guide showing us stars through the main telescope. It was truly amazing and like nothing I have ever seen before. We were then led outside where he pointed out consolations which were upside down! That probably sounds ridiculous but for some reason I hadn´t really thought that everything in the sky is the other way up in the Southern hemisphere to how we see it in the North. It also means that they see different things at different times of the year to us. The thing that amused me most about this is that, as all the astronomy books they consult are written by those in the Northern hemisphere, they have to turn them upside down to look at the consolations! After the outside bit we were taken back into the centre where we were shown slides of the sky. Far from being dull it was absolutely fascinating, even more so as the guide was so enthusiastic. He was so informative and showed us some amazing slide photos, including one he had taken himself over some ridiculously long exposure. We were told about the current and future, planned telescopes in Chile. The biggest is currently the imaginatively titled V.L.T. (not a weird vegetarian sandwich but Very Large Telescope). It´s four large telescopes with a computer which combines the images projecting them together to make one very large one. The huge, planned telescope is called O.W.L. which, again somewhat entertainingly, stands for Overwhelmingly Large. These astronomers are creative types aren´t they? Either that or they have very dry humour!
After the night of astronomy which I really can´t rave on about enough, we headed back to the campsite for a night in the van and tent, respectively.