South American Observatory Visits

I had the exciting opportunity to visit three state-of-the-art observatories in the Atacama desert region of Northern Chile. The first was the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Radio Telescope (not pictured) on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Andes mountain range. The remaining two were the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) on Cerro Armazones. The latter is still under construction and is set to be the world’s largest optical/near-infrared telescope. I had the unique chance to see the ELT’s observatory up close during the assembly of the dome shutter.