I have never felt like such a tourist as when I did when we walked into the office of the observatory and it was full of people, some Chilean, some German and us! We paid and then shortly after set off on our minibus ride up the hills and to the observatory, the bus was full and the ride up the hill was a very slow and bumpy one. Once we got to near the top the driver had to dip his lights and the road from here on in was illuminated by red and blue lights on the side of the road, presumably not to disturb the observatory so they can see all the sky without the slightest bit of light pollution. At the destination all you could hear was a mix of Spanish, German and American, a few English arrived a bit later on. We were in the English group, meaning the tour was most probably going to be taken by somebody with broken English, being unable to explain certain things and answer some questions. All the English speakers were escorted away from the main observatory building towards the actual telescope dome, nobody knew what was going on, the main building had a big auditorium where the 'lesson' was taking place but that was for the Spanish speakers. In the ground floor of the dome, there was a projector and a computer set up with all these slides and power-point presentations to show us, also a website called sollerium or something along those lines, it was a free downloadable programme that had the nights sky and stars and pretty much had a map of the whole solar system as we know it, it looked quite good, a fun tool to have and I will definitely be downloading it next time I get access to the internet. The person taking the tour seemed like a fun loving bloke, he made some jokes but in broken English with a very strong Spanish accent and a slightly monotone voice nobody understood. Some of the photographs though, there was one taken by the Hubble space telescope of what had been called 'the pillars of life' it was a nebula in some other galaxy but it was breathtaking, it looked unreal, he explained that they are just mixtures of gases or different elements for example gold, hydrogen and oxygen but they produced the most beautiful of shapes and colours. There were more nebulas and planets and stars, he explained the constellation and later on showed us a coupled, the main one being Orion, with his sword, belt and arrow/shield depending who you talk to. Up in the top of the dome was a telescope, far smaller than I had expected, in fact it was so small it looked almost like the sort that you can buy in a science shop, I was told it cost about $20,000 US. He set it up to look at Saturn, I had never actually seen a planet before so was quite excited about the chance. He did previously explain that what we see would appear black and white as our eyes cannot pick up Infra Red or other sorts of light, only a small amount in the whole spectrum of light itself. Saturn didn't seem real, it either looked as though it had been drawn on by pencil or was just a slide but it was definitely real, I'm more than positive of that. It has to be said the whole experience of seeing a planet through a telescope was a bit of an anti climax, I had expected so much more and in a way had been let down a little. We were all led outside now to a couple of bigger telescopes but far more basic and fully manual so had to be focused and pointed by somebody with a skilled eye, the guide said he was going to show us a few different stars form different constellations and other stars in the sky. Firstly he started with the bottom star in the sword on the Orion constellation, from the naked eye it looked like a single star but up close with the telescope it was a series of four in the shape of a trapezium, not too impressive yet, still more to come hopefully. He showed a few more not so impressive stars, then he showed us one of a single star but when viewed through the telescope, there were far more than four stars, more than one million I am told, it is one of the largest in the nearby galaxy. It was mad, looking from the ground it clearly looked like a single star but in the telescope it was a blur there were that many stars, it is believed that the stars span some six hundred light years. To put this into perspective, our planetary system has eight light days from the Sun to the asteroid field past Pluto, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is five light minutes, meaning it takes five minutes for the light from the Sun to reach the Earth. I found the whole experience to be very informative, if not a little short and maybe a little overpriced for what you actually get but it was a lot cheaper than some who came from La Serena and that costed $15,000 pesos.