![]() ![]() John used his Leatherman and some other tools he had in his pockets to bang on the crystalline structures, and with the different tones, he was making some music! It was very cool and also very strange. The salt chunks were also very sharp - I was glad I had my hiking boots on with Vibram soles. Well, the landscape was flat, but the salt formed stalagmites that stuck up out of the ground! We pulled off to give it a closer look, and it was extremely hard stuff. Unlike salt flats in other parts of the world, the one here in the Atacama Desert was not really that flat. Salar de Atacama was both the name of the general area, and supposedly a particular lagoon in the salt flats. On the highway, we crossed the line of the Tropic of Capricorn! Try again tomorrow.so instead we set our GPS for one of the sites in the salt flats, Salar de Atacama. Our first stop was the Valle de la Luna, or "Valley of the Moon," but they only allow car entry between 8 AM and 1 PM, so we missed our chance. So I copied last night's data off of my memory cards, drank a hearty cup of coffee, and we left at 2:30 PM to go to dome sightseeing. I managed once again to sleep in until 12:45 PM, and thank goodness! I was starting to feel more adjusted to the altitude (7800’), and my two traveling companions (John and Beth) and I felt ready to go do some daytime exploring. I have kept a log of all of my astronomy nights since I started the hobby back in July 2015 this is night #197, which was my third dark, steady, cloudless night at the Atacama Lodge. I had brought down my Nikon D5300, Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer DSLR tracking mount, and three lenses: the stock 18-55mm f/3.5 lens, an older 70-300mm f/4-5.6 lens, and a new 35mm f/1.8 lens I had just purchased before the trip. ![]() I had rented an imaging rig (which he usually doesn’t do, but I convinced him I knew what I was doing), but some power issues with the mount left me using my own gear most of the week. You can also stay in one of the adobe cabins on-site, and rent a telescope for yourself. The Atacama Lodge is owned by French expat Alain Maury, who maintains several robotic telescopes and offers nightly tours to buses of people in his sunflower field of home-built Dobsonians. It was an incredible experience, especially when shared with some 250,000 people who flooded the area! The second week we spent at the Atacama Lodge, just south of the touristy village of San Pedro de Atacama in the northern part of Chile. We spent the first week in Santiago and La Serena, and we watched the eclipse from the village of La Higuera, about 50 km north of the coastal town of La Serena. ![]() It was an incredible trip! The small group of us from my astronomy club had two goals: see the July 2nd solar eclipse, and observe the Southern skies from the dark, high-altitude air of the Atacama Desert. For the first two weeks of July 2019, I had the grand opportunity to take a vacation to northern Chile. ![]()
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