Astronomer's Paradise - the darkest skies in Chile at the ESO Observatory Cerro Paranal

Atacama Starry Nights: Episode I. Astronomer's Paradise is the first episode of a Atacama Starry Nights timelapse movie series.

So cool: As mentioned by Dr. Brian May here (scroll down a bit): http://brianmay.com/whatsnew.html (Sat. Dec. 1st, 2012)

On
National Geographic http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.c...
Nikon Rumours! http://nikonrumors.com/2012/02/27/gue...

Cerro Paranal is an astronomers paradise with its stunningly dark, steady and transparent sky. Located in the barren Atacama Desert of Chile it is home to some of the world's leading telescopes.

Operated by the European Southern Observatory (www.eso.org) the Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located on the Paranal mountain, composed of four 8 m telescopes which can combine their light to make a giant telescope by interferometry.

Four smaller auxiliary telescopes, each 1.8 m in aperture, are important elements of the VLT interferometer.

Walking on the desert near Paranal between the scattered stones and boulders on the pale red dust, feels like being on Mars but under the Earth sky.

Paranal was selected for cutting edge astronomical observations also because of the sky transparency and steady atmospheric condition which let astronomers peer into tiny details in the deep cosmos using giant telescopes.

This film is made with footage from the November 2011 TWAN imaging expedition to Paranal assigned by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). We photographed 14 nights in a row from usually 05:30 pm to 08:00 a.m.

All video rights reserved by Christoph Malin (www.christophmalin.com) and Babak Tafreshi ([email protected]) of The World at Night (TWAN) program (www.twanight.org/tafreshi).
The inside vista-observatory video is contributed by Stephane Guisard (www.astrosurf.com/sguisard).

The music is by Carbon Based Lifeforms (carbonbasedlifeforms.net). Song Arecibo extract from the album [Twentythree], write & produced by Johannes Hedberg and Daniel Segerstad, published by Ultimae (ultimae.com).

Equipment used by Christoph on assignment:

2 Nikon D3s
1 Nikon D700
1 Nikon D7000
2 AFS 12-24/2.8, 1 AFS 24-70/2.8, 1 AF 16/2.8 Fisheye, 1 AF DX 10/2.8 Fisheye
Dynamic Perception Stage Zero Dolly with MX2
Astrotrac AT320 X-AG and Merlin with MX2

Transitions done with Apple Aperture (see http://vimeo.com/35998334). Edited and rendered with Final Cut Pro 10, Motion and Compressor. Some re-edits recently done with LR4 and LRT, fun!. About 35000 TimeLapse images processed, 7500 used for this part of "Astronomers Paradise".

I hope we could at least capture the magic of this very special place a bit - this is how the night sky looks like, if people care about light pollution. And we need more people to do that.

With best regards,
Christoph Malin

web // christophmalin.com
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http://christophmalin.zenfolio.com (fine art prints of this movie and others)
http://twanight.org/cmalin