A local story about it: https://radio.uchile.cl/2025/01/11/proyecto-inna-la-iniciati...
When I lived in the Welsh countryside, there were occasional nights where I could not see my hand in front of my face. The requirements were that it was new moon, and that there was slight fog. We also lived deep in a valley, which helped. I had great fun navigating my way to the local pub in complete darkness.
The odd thing is that when I recount that experience, some people refuse to believe me. Of course they are all city dwellers.
peril-sensitive sunglasses wouldn't help!
I live that experience daily. I live in a very remote corner of Portugal - we are between bortle 2 and 3 - in the bottom of a deep, steep valley.
And yes - when it’s a new moon and the haze from the river blots out the stars, the experience is quite akin to having gone blind. In fact, it’s so dark I’ve used some of those nights to develop film at the outdoor sink.
One thing I’ve noted is that wildlife needs to see just as much as we do - I mean, obvious, right? - but those nights are always dead silent. No birds, no insects, no rustles of this that or the other in the undergrowth. Every little noise one makes seems an affront to the cloying, thick darkness. Perhaps it’s the same instinct at play.
My place in wales used to have dark skies, even fairly recently - but LED street lighting along rural roads has put paid to that. I earnestly don’t understand why a lane that sees zero foot traffic and perhaps one car during darkness hours needs a streetlamp every ten meters - while waste collections only happen every six weeks.
Ah, I have become a grumpy old astronomer.
I looked up bortle and Portugal, and Google gave my a light pollution map. I still don’t know what bortle means…
It’s not just industrial sites. My “local” (4 hours away) dark sky spot is constantly battling light pollution. There’s an industrial complex that’s made an agreement to turn their lights off at midnight. They’ve made deals with the county to replace the lighting to be dark sky friendly, but they still have private land owners that refuse to cooperate and replace their lighting. I have many images of the Milky Way with ranch lights dotting horizon.
Would it be unthinkable to just NOT have bright lights pointed at the sky all night? Could they still do this project with severe restrictions on light emissions? If there’s some reason it absolutely must include hundreds of outdoor sodium vapor lights then build it somewhere else.
> Would it be unthinkable to just NOT have bright lights pointed at the sky all night?
That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.
However, the project's critics have already said that no plan the project comes up with will be good enough - “Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant [0]
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/chilean-energy-megap...
The plan of "don't build a major industrial centre 5km from the best site for optical astronomy in the world, build it somewhere else" seems like a perfect viable one to me.
Well, local people probably care about economic development and don’t give a rat’s ass about astronomy. So the question becomes, who’s going to compensate for the loss of economic development? (By local I don’t mean strictly local, in case of counter arguments along the line that there are no/very few local people to begin with.)
Disclosure: I’m a former physicist and I have personally operated an optical telescope with a 15’ dome, as well as a 60’ radio telescope, which probably puts me among 0.01% of world’s population. So I do know a thing or two and care about astronomy.
My understanding is ESO uses local labour where possible (e.g on building the ELT, maintenance, catering, transport), so it's not like it's one guy in a shed, there are jobs and economic benefits. That's why this seems so confusing to me, I can't see why you can't have both?
Do you mean that the economical output of astronomy and this industrial project is comparable?
So that would be Mauna Kea. I don't believe there is any industry being built near there.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I though Paranal beat Mauna Kea (and some basic google searches aren't throwing up anything that makes me question it, e.g. https://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/astclim/espas/espas_reports..., though that's from more than 20 years ago, so site quality has likely changed since then). There's also the issue of northern vs. southern sky.
> That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.
Given the size of the site (over 3000 hectares), even lights purely pointed at the ground will still create large amounts of bounce lighting. The ground reflects light up in the sky.
If you were wondering if there was any issue even less important to Americans than the lives of pedestrians and cyclists, it is dark skies.
Disagree. Or at least it’s a different set of people generally very supportive of dark skies.
There are many dark sky communities in the southwest that are otherwise standard car centric unwalkable american towns.
Which is too bad, because it takes a special kind of heartless, empathy-lacking ghoul to disregard such things that make life on this Earth worth living to so many people.
Pretty fucked up to say that people that don't have dark skies even on their radar with everything going on right now are heartless and lacking empathy. It shows a gross misunderstanding of the average person today and really shows your lack of empathy.
I shoot astro, I love it. I wish skies were darker. But I certainly don't blame my comrades for not giving two fucks about how the sky looks when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent.
"...when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent."
No one else sleeps or works, right?
Plus, who knows why they work more than one job. Maybe they were "too smart" for school, found out later that they weren't, and now are grasping to close the gap due to hubris and ignorance early on in their life. No shame in making up for lost time/wages, but that's not our fault and we shouldn't have to constantly bend and bow in order to appease the LCD crowd.
If you're surprised the night sky isn't top on people's minds today, you live in a very different world than most.
school children not getting shot is still pretty low.
I don't know of any Americans that advocate for shooting of school children.
They said it's low importance to a ton of people, not that those people want the opposite.
did you miss the "not" in the sentence?
I would say quiet.
Every place I've moves to in recent years looks nice, but you can't enjoy it because passenger cars and trucks have gotten louder without restraint or consequence. This doesn't mean right next to a major freeway, either; half-a-mile (about a kilometer) or more away from most 4-lane roads isn't far enough.
For an example, look up how many tickets in any given city have been issued for an improperly maintained exhaust system.
Police only care about speeding tickets. So much so, that even if a noisy "sports" car is pulled over for speeding, they won't be issued a noise citation in concert.
Why? ACAB.
Cops probably drive around in noisy cars/trucks after work (and some jurisdictions have police cruisers with a throaty exhaust because of course they do), so ticketing those violations isn't in their own best interest.
Anyway, noise is way more of an IDGAF issue for any city in the US.
why is this downvoted? the specific cities (notably in Arizona) that have taken deliberate action on this are exceptions proving the general rule that light pollution is demonstrably less of a policy concern even compared to the notorious American disdain for walkable infrastructure.
The telescopes are 8,000 miles south of America. Why does American policy matter?
Because the goods made will be sold to American consumers directly and indirectly and are priced to reflect all kinds of costs including EPA compliance in domestic markets.
European markets also demand European norms to labour and health and environment are met, even if tokenistically. To some it is a form of protectionism.
It's also the "why can't we make it here" reasoning. If you tried to make it in the US it would be white anted out by lawfare. That's what happened to BHP when they proposed metals and minerals processing plants on the Californian coast.
Ammonia and hydrogen are essentially energy export mechanisms. They'll be exported to energy poor places, aka Asia, not America. they can and are made in America without fanfare. You wouldn't have states fighting to exlude green hydrogen or ammonia plants, you'd have states competing on how many subsidies they could give them.
Arguably, very likely true. But the fertiliser (the other ammonia product, the one we do mostly now the others being somewhat futurological) will I am sure sell worldwide. I'm personally sceptical about the hydrogen economy I can't see it working. It's biggish in some Australian circles, both because of IPR around the processes and people in related fields looking at uses for surplus solar power. Twiggy Forrest was big in it, wanted the sun cable proposal to pivot over, its partly why the JV with Cannon Brookes fell apart.
My comment was to the more general "why can't we have nice things" about industrial placement. I spent time in Culpeper and the number of "no more Datacentre" signs were amazing. Old folks who retired to the country don't want them build nearby. It's a large federal and private investment in tech services. And growing.
It's also an American company building the project. The cultural values of the US are relevant.
A cynic would read this as as "I can't believe our (AES) luck. There's a good chance we can squeeze the Europeans for lots of money. We'll gladly share some of the proceeds with the new US president's cronies for having them do the haggling."
You want a real conspiracy theory? How about this: some rich Thirty Meters Telescope patron saw the peril the project has been in and set out to sabotage the ELT!
Of course, the ELT is proper funded, so the best he can do is making it useless by ruining it's sky for a decade with construction dust and light.
Not sure this would be affected:
The Vera Rubin scope, which cost $600+ million, will see first light this July. It's capable of creating a map of the entire available sky every few days. Containing 40B objects, several times more than all previous sky surveys combined.
Half of those images are already threatened by constellations of comm satellites. Another concern is spy satellite imaging. https://archive.is/RzCNI#selection-779.4-779.14
So what compels AES, a US power company, to build a facility there, in all the world ... which would pump out that much pollution?
No, the Vera Rubin Observatory is on Cerro Pachón (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory) rather than Cerro Paranal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope), the maps on the right hand side show the difference (~6° latitude). Similarly I wouldn't expect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Silla_Observatory to be affected, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope would be I expect (noting that I haven't seen anything beyond the ESO press release).
The skies may be brightening, but it seems the world is turning darker.
On another piece of the electromagnetic spectrum, the ALMA radio telescope is also in the Atacama desert, north east of Paranal.
The government agreed to a radio quiet zone in the areas surrounding ALMA.
But now there's Starlink and other satellite constellations coming on line at an unprecedented pace.
Are those satellites broadcasting while over those areas? I don't see the connection here.
In fact it looks like there's extra effort to let them keep running without causing problems https://public.nrao.edu/news/astronomers-satellite-internet-...
I did a bunch of astrophotography in the Atacama desert last year, it was an absolutely phenomenal place. There are a lot of celestial objects you cannot image from the northern hemisphere and there aren't many other places in the southern hemisphere with weather conditions that good (maybe Namibia but it doesn't have the altitude advantage).
The only thing I wish is that some of the parks would be open after dark to shoot landscapes. Most of the parks closed before sunset, so I had to mostly image from roadsides, which was kind of sad.
BANANAs in action, can't even build a green energy facility in the literal middle of nowhere without complaints.
This isn't just about getting rid of the last place on earth you can sometimes get a truly dark sky. This is about progress itself
> Since its inauguration in 1999, Paranal Observatory, built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has led to significant astronomy breakthroughs, such as the first image of an exoplanet and confirming the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 was awarded for research on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, in which Paranal telescopes were instrumental. The observatory is a key asset for astronomers worldwide, including those in Chile, which has seen its astronomical community grow substantially in the last decades. Additionally, the nearby Cerro Armazones hosts the construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s biggest telescope of its kind — a revolutionary facility that will dramatically change what we know about our Universe.
It's not literally the last place on Earth with dark skies. It's just one place with dark skies where they built a telescope. This isn't about protecting the sky and it's not about "progress", it's about protecting an investment of money in a telescope.
The price of launching giant telescopes to space is set to plummet in the next few years with Starship and New Glenn coming online. IMO we should be focusing on that rather than blocking development on Earth to preserve previous investments in ground based telescopes.
No, but it's one of three places on Earth that have dark skies this good.
The fact you don't know Paranal host many more than "one telescope" doesn't surprise me, as your are obviously very ignorant of modern astronomy.
Launching telescopes is not a viable alternative to ground based telescopes. They are completely different scales. We would need large scale orbital construction facilities or a space elevator to bridge that gap. We don’t need to develop every square inch of the planet to support humanity, we don’t take up that much space.
5 km from infrastructure critical to Chilean science isn't really "nowhere".
It’s an industrial plant with an attached power plant, it’s not like families will be using this power.
How is it you think families get power, goods, and services?
Ammonia makes fertilizer - this plant will help feed millions, dropping food costs. Even if the power this plant is generating won't go directly to families, it will be going into the things they eat and the things they buy in place of power they can use directly.
is this the last place on earth to build that kind of industry?
I think its fair enough to not build it here, but everywhere there will be arguments made against all projects so it can get old fast
It’s nothing to do with the merits of the project itself but that it would destroy a singular planetary resource.
It's not "destroyed". If a dire need for dark skies arises, you can always... turn the lights off.
Headline is dramatic but misleading. Essentially the entire 7/10 of the planet in the ocean has skies as dark as this. Clarity significantly reduces the footprint, but there are massive chunks of mountain ranges untouched by human development in both hemispheres that would be just as clear as here.
If clear skies are important enough to block a new development, they should just unlock some land in the Himalayas or Rockies to replace this observatory.
This spot in the Atacama desert isn't special for it's lack of light pollution alone. The sky is rarely, if ever covered in clouds or haze. And the temperature gradient in the air has a shape that prevents random atmospheric distortions that would make long term exposures blurry. This combination of properties is exceedingly rare on Earth.
> they should just unlock some land in the Himalayas or Rockies to replace this observatory
That "just" is sure doing a lot of work in this suggestion.
This place has an elevation of 5000m and the air is super dry.
I recommend reading up on why these observatories and telescopes are where they are in the Atacama. It’s not just about the lack of light pollution, it’s a specific geography that “smoooths out” the air. Something about the high elevation prominence coming up directly from the coast creates a unique situation that allows for longer exposures, something that is less possible out in the open ocean. The only other comparable place are the high peaks of Hawaii, but these are mostly off limits due to native protections.
Destroying an aspect of the dark skies in Chile will absolutely hurt astronomy. No, they would not just be able to move their operations out onto a different mountain range or into the open ocean.
Who is paying for this move and all the requisite supporting infrastructure? You aren’t just dropping it from a helicopter and calling it a day.
who pays for moving the observatory?
could you move the industry there?
Who’s “they”.