ABSTRACT
The night is warm, even at an altitude of 9000 feet. That’s what you get during summer on the edges of the Atacama desert in Chile. I’m at the La Silla observatory, part of the European Southern Observatory. It’s on a mountain in the foothills of the Andes, sitting between the coastal fogs along the edge of the Pacific, and the mountain storms of the true Andes. It has clear skies, and good weather and, since the first telescope was built here in the 1960s, it has grown so many observatory domes that you might think the summit was infected with an obscure kind of giant mushroom.
