Join David Koerner in an exploration of ways of seeing: “Sky watching is enriched by knowing the cultural perspectives of indigenous communities. Native relationships to Earth and Sky challenge western ideas of a “mechanical universe” in which humans struggle to control nature as a machine. Indigenous frameworks, instead, see a reciprocal relationship with a “living universe,” one that is illustrated by sky stories like the Paiute explanation for the North Star. This outlook brings an added dimension to our view of the night sky and is pertinent in times of self-inflicted environmental crisis.”
Science and art unite in this beautiful photograph, taken in Chile’s Atacama Desert by ESO Photo Ambassador Adhemar M. Duro Jr. To create this visual masterpiece Adhemar pointed his camera at the sky’s south pole, the point at the centre of all the bright arcs and circles. All the stars in the night sky revolve around this point. Over a period of several hours, this motion creates star trails, with each individual star tracing out a circle on the sky. These trails display the various brightnesses and colours of each star, creating a captivating scene! Towards the top left of the image, you can see a short, bright streak of light cutting across the trails — this is caused by a meteor, burning up in a flash of light as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. The desert’s harsh and arid landscape, illuminated here by the light from the stars themselves, is the perfect place to view the night sky. Because of the location’s favourable conditions several telescopes are hosted here, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope, ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), and the forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently under construction atop Cerro Armazones.
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Envisioning a world where everyone can see the Milky Way where they live
