The Iron Desert - 1

2500 meters above the the Pacific ocean (covered by clouds), on theCerro Paranal, roughly 100 km south of Antofagasta, Chile, where theESO Very Large Telescope is placed. Although quite close to the sea,this is one of the driest places on Earth, typical humidity is below10% and rainfall is extremely scarce. There is not a single watersource within 40 kilometers, so that the Observatory should besupplied by means of tanker trucks. While the conditions are hostileto life (there is no visible vegetation nor animals) they are quitedesirable for an astronomical observatory site.

Thank you forcomments and critiques.

L.

I liked this one more. This is due mostly to the "punchy" nature, as yo call it.

The other one is also quite nice in its own right, by the way...

Presence of a person or some other "known" thing at the foregrund to feed the sense of scale might have made a contribution to this one, I guess...

Bulent,

you are quite right of course: the scale is lost here. Myself, I don't dislike it, I like the fact that these images become somewhat graphical, or abstract. Practically, the largest rock you see in the bottom center should be more or less the size of a rugby ball. The point is... there was NOTHING and NO ONE to put in the scenery, unless I asked some colleague in the observatory to drop his work and come for a stroll. For the same reason, when you look around you totally lose the sense of distances, and cannot really understand how far that hill is, because there is nothing recognizable to lock your sight on. Is the part of the fascination of such a place.

There is an amusing detail: part of the latest 007 movie "quantum of solace" was actually shot there: all the showdown between 007 and the bad guy, allegedly taking place in a super-luxury hotel in the bolivian desert, has been shot using the (quite amazing) underground astronomers' residence at Paranal, and the surrounding desert. Since there is a scene when Bond hides behind some fairly large boulders, thy had to make them fake (they are still there I believe) because there is essentially no large rock up there: everything was broken down by thermal excursions looong ago...

L.