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Abstract

If you ever fly from Europe to South America, the chances that the person in the seat next to you is an astronomer may be larger than you think. A little less than half of the world’s 6000 professional astronomers live in Europe and many of them regularly travel to the South. The goal of their journey lies in the dry Atacama desert, more than 600 km north of Santiago de Chile, under the splendid southern sky. Here they stay at the ESO La Silla Observatory, days or months at a time, scrutinizing the Universe with the most powerful astronomical instruments available.

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© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lausten, S., Madsen, C., West, R.M. (1987). Introduction. In: Exploring the Southern Sky. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61588-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61588-7_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-64877-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-61588-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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