The Stars at Night...

The Stars at Night;

Are Big and Bright;

Deep in the Heart of Chile...

Texans may take offense at this, but its true. Drew and I deep into Chile by this point. We are currently in Santiago and getting ready to head for Easter Island. But, I am still well behind in my blog posts so let me catch you up to our first stop - La Serena, Chile.

After Drew and I decided to cut our time short in Peru, we hopped the first bus south. Over the next 48 hours, 34 of those were on a bus. We spend two full nights sleeping on buses and the rest of the time in bus stations, immigration offices, custom houses, and drug check lines. This sounds bad, but it infinitely better than crossing the Ecuador/Peru border.

When you get off of a bus after 34 hours there here are your priorities: find a bathroom and find food not purchased from a vending machine. Finding a hotel comes way, way down the list. We were in La Serena for two reasons. First, we just couldn´t sit on a bus any longer. Second, due to funky atmospheric conditions, La Serena has the best star gazing on the continent. There are four or five observatories within an hour of the city, including the building in the final fight scene of the new James Bond movie. The building is part of the European Space Observatory, and while the movie claims to take place in Bolivia, the desert and observatory is in Chile. Bolivia just makes a better bad guy.

So we spent our time out at the observatories. I won´t bore you with all the details, but observatories are fun places for the Cash family. We grew up close to an observatory in Ohio and spent many summer nights out there. (Mike Sigrist, my dad, and I also used to play golf through one of the antennas used for the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, but that is another story.)

From the Southern Hemisphere a lot of new constellations appear and a lot of the old favorites look a little different. We spend time watching Orion, Taurus, the great bear, and the Southern Cross all move across the horizon. We trained telescopes on several nebula and two small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way like the Moon orbits Earth. The picture of the moon was taken by holding my camera up to the telescope lens.

I also picked up some worthless trivia. J.K. Rowlings named several of the Harry Potter characters after stars. Specifically, Sirius Black (named after the dog star) and his sister Bellatrix Lestrange (named after a star in Orion). Also, the symbol for Subaru cars is the Pleiades star cluster. We call them the Seven Sisters after the sisters of Greek Mythology. We see seven bright stars (there are hundred or thousands), but the Japanese only see six.