Our group of more than 30 Astronomy readers had a spectacular time over the last couple weeks in Chile, seeing the greatest skies on Earth and some of the largest telescopes.
One of the folks on our tour was Mike Smithwick, creator of the great planetarium program Distant Suns, a partner of Astronomy magazine.
In Chile, Mike created some very cool virtual-reality pan images at different sites.
This first one I’ll share shows the 8.2-meter “Antu” telescope, one of four scopes that make up the ESO Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal.
Now this is a cool image!