Atacama Desert – The Driest Place on Earth

[longknife]

Due to heavy rains earlier in the year. More photos @ Story @ In Images: Stunning Flower Fields of the Atacama Desert

 

[ChesBayJJ]

It must be global warming

or La Nina

or God

or something

 

[longknife]

It always amazes me what happens in the desert after some rain. It comes alive.

 

[waltky]

Alma telescope peers into space...

Alma telescope peers into space from Chile's mountains
Sat, 28 May 2016 - Alma telescope peers into space from Chile

On a bitterly cold afternoon, a small team of engineers moves slowly across Chile's Chajnantor plateau. Bundled up against the biting wind, they stop under one of the dozens of giant telescopic dishes scattered across the moon-like landscape. They unfold a stepladder and clamber up into the back of the dish to carry out routine maintenance. Each man carries oxygen. At over 5,000m (16,400ft) above sea level, the air here is so thin it is difficult to breathe. Flurries of snow blow across the plateau. The temperature is -5C, with a wind chill factor of -19C.

'Giant chess board'

This is Alma, the most powerful radio telescope in the world and one of the most extraordinary places in Chile. Perched in the Andes mountains, close to the borders with Argentina and Bolivia, it consists of 66 dishes, or antennas, of up to 12m in diameter. The dishes can be moved across the plateau like pieces on a giant chess board. Each one weighs 100 tonnes. The engineers use two massive yellow trucks to haul them into place. Sometimes the dishes are placed right next to each other. At other times they are up to 15km apart. Their positioning determines which part of the universe they point toward.

The dishes then work in unison, detecting radio waves from outer space. The waves are converted into data by a super-computer, as powerful as three million laptops, and that data is sent to Alma's operations centre down the mountainside in the relative warmth at 2,900m. There, astronomers pore over it, using it to expand our knowledge of the universe and to make some remarkable discoveries. "Just last year we found a site where a disc is being formed around a star, and where planets are being formed," says Violette Impellizzeri, an operations astronomer at Alma. "It was so spectacular that even people here at the observatory were blown away by it. It looked like an artist's painting."

Dark matter