First Telescope

The human eye was our first space image detector. It has 576 megapixels or approximately 0.3 meters at one-kilometer resolution. On a beautifully clear night at the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in New Zealand with the Milky Way displayed above us, we can see about 5,000 stars at best.

Another incredible place for similar dark sky stargazing is found in Chile’s Atacama Desert. While several observatories already exist there, such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), a new one will be available for science in 2022. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is currently under construction but when is it finished, the telescope will be capable of spotting rare events that are presently hard or impossible to find. The telescope is on a peak called Cerro Pachón, about 9,000 feet above sea level.