We left Socos and continued North.\u00a0 There\u00b4s a pattern emerging here for the more astute of you!\u00a0 when we got to Vicuna we instantly fell in love with the beautiful town with a lovely leafy square in the middle.\u00a0 The town is along the Elqui valley which, along with producing some great Chilean wine, makes for a stunning drive.\u00a0 In the town itself we looked around several artisan type places before having lunch.\u00a0 One of the draws of the area is the observatories which Chile is famous for.\u00a0 Aswell as having a great climate and low light pollution for visibility, it also has the Andes which, strangely enough being quite high, are great for star gazing!\u00a0 So we headed to the town observatory where we had read we could do a bit of a Patrick Moore.\u00a0 When we got there it was closed but on the way back there was a sign to a campsite.\u00a0 Slightly tongue in cheek we drove up the stony road, only to be very pleasantly surprised by the most lovely, deserted hillside campsite with a beautiful pool.\u00a0 We checked in and headed back into town to buy tickets for the observatory on the advice of the owner of the campsite.<\/p>\n
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Once back in town the observatory was shut.\u00a0 When we asked (that\u00b4s the Royal We here you understand which normally means my Mum, occasionally my Dad and rarely to never me) when the ticket office would be open.\u00a0 In typical Chilean style the random passerby we asked phoned to check for us and then informed us that we could wait for the person.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Tickets in hand we headed back to the campsite where we relaxed and ate dinner before heading to the observatory.\u00a0 When we got there we were told we were the only English group so we had a guide to ourselves.\u00a0 The tour started with the guide showing us stars through the main telescope.\u00a0 It was truly amazing and like nothing I have ever seen before.\u00a0 We were then led outside where he pointed out consolations which were upside down!\u00a0 That probably sounds ridiculous but for some reason I hadn\u00b4t really thought that everything in the sky is the other way up in the Southern hemisphere to how we see it in the North.\u00a0 It also means that they see different things at different times of the year to us.\u00a0 The thing that amused me most about this is that, as all the astronomy books they consult are written by those in the Northern hemisphere, they have to turn them upside down to look at the consolations!\u00a0 After the outside bit we were taken back into the centre where we were shown slides of the sky.\u00a0 Far from being dull it was absolutely fascinating, even more so as the guide was so enthusiastic.\u00a0 He was so informative and showed us some amazing slide photos, including one he had taken himself over some ridiculously long exposure.\u00a0 We were told about the current and future, planned telescopes in Chile.\u00a0 The biggest is currently the imaginatively titled V.L.T. (not a weird vegetarian sandwich but Very Large Telescope).\u00a0 It\u00b4s four large telescopes with a computer which combines the images projecting them together to make one very large one.\u00a0 The huge, planned telescope is called O.W.L. which, again somewhat entertainingly, stands for Overwhelmingly Large.\u00a0 These astronomers are creative types aren\u00b4t they?\u00a0 Either that or they have very dry humour!<\/p>\n
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After the night of astronomy which I really can\u00b4t rave on about enough, we headed back to the campsite for a night in the van and tent, respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We left Socos and continued North.\u00a0 There\u00b4s a pattern emerging here for the more astute of you!\u00a0 when we got to Vicuna we instantly fell in love with the beautiful town with a lovely leafy square in the middle.\u00a0 The town is along the Elqui valley which, along with producing some great Chilean wine, makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}