ATacama At Night --- ATAN

How does it appear an unpolluted sky? What can be seen? How many stars? And the Milky Way is visible? These are some of the questions that many persons are asking to me, so I decided to create a time lapse video with the footage taken during the last three months under the Atacama Sky. This video well shows you the beauty of the sky. With naked eye you don't see the colours and the contrasts are more tenuous, but the show is still gorgeous. Enjoy the time lapse with 4K resolution:

When I was younger and was taking my first steps into the observation of the night sky, I remember very well one of my first astronomical book and especially a chapter where it described the aspect of a perfect sky. A perfect sky is the most normal thing we can imagine: a night sky not contaminated by artificial light. It's the most normal thing because for 4.6 billion of years every living species on Earth saw it and it was normal, just like the rise and set of the Sun, every day. In the last 100 year, the most invasive specie of the Planet was able to destroy the natural beauty of the dark sky for over 80% of the Human population. Now, after 4.6 billion of years, we are the first generation of the entire history of life on Earth that cannot see a perfect night sky. There is just one thing worse than forgetting something important: not having the possibility to do it. We then not only don't see anymore a perfect sky but almost everyone doesn't have memory about that.

In Atacama the Sun is shining almost every day of the year but there are moments, quite rare, when some thin clouds break the monotony. None of them are capable to cover all the sky or generate rain, and often they are so thin that cannot even efficiently block the light of the stars. But when the Sun is approaching the horizon and finally disappears after almost 12 hours of unchallenged kingdom, these clouds can create an amazing painting in the sky. The light of the Sun, just below the horizon, lights up the thin cirrus and give them a brief moment of glory. Just few minutes before the appearance of the first stars, a short sigh where time and space take a small break. In these moments the transition between our daily reality and the Cosmos become a moment to remember, a moment to enjoy, a moment to embrace the beauty of our Nature, which is now ready to leave the scene and let the lights of the Cosmos reflect into our eyes.

The Atacama desert, in northern Chile, is the driest and most ancient desert of the world. This narrow strip of land, where the Sun shines more than 320 days per year, has something special: due to the dry air, high altitude and the lacking of light pollution, the Atacama desert is by far the best place on Earth to observe the sky. In the Atacama desert the stars shine like no other place on Earth. There are so many stars during a normal night that you can easily get lost and not recognise even the brightest constellations. The Milky Way, especially the winter portion (that is summer for northern hemisphere observers) is so bright that can illuminate the ground. The brightest planets, like Venus and Jupiter, and even the brightest stars, like Sirius, cast an obvious shadow on the ground. In Atacama desert, then, we can observe the real Universe, we can think about the big questions of our lives and we can feel part of the Cosmos. ATacama At Night (ATAN) is a photographic projec