Andes Mountains

We drive to a private, self-built observatory, located in the mountains 105 km north of Santiago. The driving time is made up for by 260 clear nights per year, and incredibly dark skies, perfect for stargazing, even through the naked eye!!! Your hosts will welcome you with a traditional “once chilena” (our version of tea), with homemade bread, tea, coffee, craft cheeses and other delicious homemade sweet and savoury traditional treats. After eating, our Astronomer introduces you to the cosmology of Andean Cultures, and the relevance certain celestial objects had to our ancestors. Afterwards, we move to the tower (every structure here is built to coincide with astronomical phenomena), where we learn to observe the negative spaces in the Milky Way (sacred to most ancient peoples of the South), and then move on to observation with telescopes, where the Astronomer addresses current, western cosmology to contextualise the objects we observe.