High above the Atacama Desert, embedded in a vast dome of sky, is the story of how we began.
By day, it’s drowned in a cloudless blue. At night it emerges, a slow germination of light sputtering to life with faint silver pinpricks that grow bolder with each darkening moment until, finally, the now-blackened Earth is crowned with a shower of starlight. This is the cosmos, draped above my head like a luminous ceiling.
Up there is Orion’s Belt, with the blue supergiant, Alnilam, blazing at its centre; over here is Jupiter. And smeared across the sky is the chorus of stars – their shimmer already thousands of light years old – that coalesce to form the Milky Way.
From my earthly position – prone and swaddled against the desert chill – I imagine a pair of interstellar eyes peering through space at me. This is what they would see: a seismic moonscape that elongates from north to south for 1000 kilometres but whose girth is compressed into the narrow space between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes; a place so parched, there’s not a drop of moisture in the air. They would behold a desert so lacking in light pollution, they’d be able to see astronomers here looking straight back at them.
The stars are at their most dazzling when seen from the Atacama. Crystal-clear skies and high altitude conspire to make it the world’s best stargazing destination. Astro-tourists and dreamers alike flock from all over the globe for the daily night show. Many head for the observatories, such as ALMA (alma observatory.org), where enormous telescopes zoom in on the celestial action, while others – like me – opt for a private after-dark tour, armed with little more than the naked eye and an abiding sense of wonder.
Days earlier, as my plane neared the gateway city of Calama, the Earth had unfolded below me in an endless cappuccino swirl. On the 100-kilometre journey from Calama to San Pedro, wind turbines swayed on the breeze and solar panels turned their faces towards the blazing sun. We drove into the world’s driest mountain range, the Domeyko, down to a desolate stretch named Patience Plain then up again into the Salt Mountains.
The Atacama had appeared from above to be a colourless expanse of desert but up close it’s a pastiche of green tamarugo forests and plains painted white with volcanic ash; black dunes rippling and rising like waves; canyons gouged from fiery orange bedrock; and volcanoes emerging, steamy-topped, from the ranges.
Salt sucks every last drop of water from this withered terrain. Conglomerate blooms with saline-spun cobwebs. Flamingos reflect shrimp-pink off lagoons stiff with brine. The earth crunches under my feet like snow. I seem to have alighted on another planet.
At night the desert is swallowed by darkness and the sky set ablaze. The universe flares out above me, a black vault haunted by the ghosts of dead stars. The one closest to Earth is not a star at all but the Orion Nebula. This is where new stars are born.
And it’s where I come from, too, for every atom of carbon in my muscles, iron in my blood and oxygen in my lungs was forged inside the stars long before Earth existed. This is my story, then, told from deep inside the cosmos: I am made of stardust and it is setting me alight with its radiance.