#VLTJupiter 5: A Tour of the Southern Sky

One of the incredible things about being on top of Cerro Paranal is the stunning visibility of the night sky and the Milky Way.  And for someone born and raised in the northern hemisphere, things can look decidedly odd.  The first thing that you notice is the moon, with the typical distribution of Mare and craters appearing upside down as viewed from the southern hemisphere.  Orion, typically a winter constellation for us, is visible at sunset from Chile.  But it's tipped over on its side, like a drunken archer, falling into the Pacific Ocean, Betelgeuse first.

Credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky

Our supporting astronomer, Florian, took us outside to see the night sky, standing in the shadow of UT1.  He pointed out Alpha Centauri 4.37 light-years away, and made the excellent point that our Sun would look exactly the same if we were standing on a planet orbiting that star, towards the constellation Cassiopeia.  Just above this bright star is the Southern Cross, although I didn't spot it at first - I was expecting five stars in a cross shape, but it's actually four stars in a kite shape.  The long axis of the Southern Cross points then towards the southern celestial pole - no pole star there, like there is in the northern hemisphere.  Just below the Cross was a darker region of the Milky Way - this was the Coalsack Nebula, 600 light years away, and blocking out the light from the galaxy.

Bruno Gilli/ESO - http://www.eso.org/public/images/milkyway/

Looking to the southwest, we could see Sirius and Canopus (second brightest star in the sky after Sirius), and using 1.5x the distance between them, following the line south, I say a breathtaking sight - my first ever view of the Large Magellanic Cloud (a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way), as a fuzzy blob south of the main band of the Milky Way.  I never knew these could be seen with the naked eye, they're quite the sight!

A lot of the objects can be identified using the in-the-sky.org website.