Elqui: visiting the Tololo observatory

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Elqui: visiting the Tololo observatory

On Saturday morning we drove up to the Tololo observatory. Elqui is famous for its clear skies and lack of light pollution – a perfect place for a light telescope, and the Tololo observatory (website here) has a few of them.

The biggest has a mirror shaped like a donut, 4.1 metres in size, and can see a long, long way. It’s sort of mind-blowing to think of looking at galaxies billions of light years away.

I admit to not being up to speed with astronomy, and all the talk of heavy matter, black holes, red dwarves and the rate of expansion of the universe made my head hurt a bit.

But I came away interested in all these concepts. I need to do some more learning.

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