#chile

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If you have the chance to see the upcoming solar on April 8, go for it! Even if you've seen an annular or an almost total one, the difference between that and a fully total one is like night and day –– pun intended!

Here's a shot I snapped of the 2019 eclipse from ESO's La Silla Observatory in . I vividly remember seeing the 's shadow crawling towards us from the Pacific Ocean. Unforgettable!

A serene, rocky desert landscape with some round, shiny telescope domes perched on one hill. The sky is completely cloudless, and its colour smoothly changes from golden in the horizon to a deep dark blue higher up. In the middle of the sky, a dark circle is surrounded by a hazy bright glow.

I took this pic quite a few years ago at ESO's Paranal Observatory in . It shows the arching over the entrance to the Residencia, the site's partially underground lodging and my home in the Atacama Desert for many hundreds of nights!

Right at the centre there's the Coalsack Nebula, known to the Mapuche people of south-central Chile as pozoko (water well) and to the Incas as yutu (a bird similar to a partridge).

A photograph of the night sky, densely packed with thousands of stars. An even denser and brighter band of stars arches horizontally across the image, with darker patches within it. In the foreground, at the bottom of the image, two dimly-lit walls meet in a corner; the walls are topped with handrails.

This is a three hour long sequence I took in Jan 2019 during a total lunar at ESO's Paranal Observatory in

As the moves into the Earth's shadow it becomes red. When sunlight passes through the Earth's atmosphere, blue light is scattered away more efficiently than red light, which passes through almost unimpeded, like at or .

From the Moon, you would see the Earth surrounded by a golden fiery ring.

A night image taken in an astronomical observatory. There are four large cylindrical telescope domes and two small rounder ones under the night sky. But the stars aren't point sources: instead, they are curved arcs streaking across the sky. In the middle of the frame there's an arc brighter than the rest. It looks like a Q-tip, with white bright ends and a thinner red middle part.