THE AFTERNOON SKIES WERE
clear and blue like countless cen-
turies of others in Chile’s Atacama
Desert when the blast rang out. The
explosion shattered the silence and
sent rock high into the thin Andean
air. Some 70 controlled detonations
would follow, removing millions of
cubic feet of dirt to flatten the peak
of Cerro Las Campanas for the nearly
$1 billion Giant Magellan Telescope.
But this won’t be the only high-
dollar instrument in the Atacama
Desert. Nearby, work has begun on
the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
designed to image the entire visible
sky every few nights. To the north,
Europeans are constructing their
Extremely Large Telescope, which
will one day be the world’s largest.
Combined with the recently finished
Atacama Large Millimeter/submil-
limeter Array, these projects will cost
more than $4 billion. This incredible
investment was lured by what is per-
haps Chile’s greatest natural resource
— some of the darkest and driest skies
on Earth. In this wasteland, the Milky
Way casts shadows, taking its claim as
the sky’s most distinguishable feature.
But even here this princely sum
isn’t enough to stop the march of
light into one of the last bastions
of the night. Cities are expand-
ing alongside tourism and mining.
Workers are improving the north-
south Panamericana Highway, where
the government is building highway
security checkpoints with hundreds
of LED streetlamps and 15 toll plaza
floodlights below telescopes on
Las Campanas and nearby La Silla.
Outside the Cerro Tololo Inter-
American Observatory in La Serena
on the Chilean coast, a new mine will
operate 24 hours a day and run mate-
rial directly to port.
Unlike the United States, Chile has a
national dark-sky ordinance. Some of
these new sites will be in direct viola-
tion of the law, but so far, that hasn’t
stopped their progress.
“We’ve got some work to do,”
says Chris Smith, the head of mis-
sion in Chile for the Association
of Universities for Research in
Astronomy. “There are a lot of cheap,
not very good lighting fixtures being
pushed for, and we’re having trouble
with LED signs that are going up.”Low-pressure sodium
streetlights in Flagstaff,
Arizona, cast a yellow
hue across the world’s
first International Dark-
Sky City as seen from
Mars Hill, home to Lowell
Observatory. BRIAN BRADLEY