From Dr. Becky.
Why don’t us astrophysicists build telescopes on the beach? On an island in the middle of the ocean they’d be so far away from light pollution! You could pick islands like Soneva Fushi or Soneva Jani in the Maldives and then after collecting your data at night just chill out on the beach during the day. So then why are the next generation of massive telescopes like the Rubin Observatory and the Extremely Large telescope both being built in the high altitude Atacama Desert in Chile instead? Well unsurprisingly they’re not built at beaches because that doesn’t get us the best scientific data. Instead there’s a few things you need when it comes to professional observatories…
00:00 Introduction
01:54 Low light pollution
02:34 Good weather
03:11 Low Humidity
03:42 Thin atmosphere (and adaptive optics)
05:44 Outro
06:27 Bloopers
I was invited to Soneva Fushi & Soneva Jani in February 2025 @discoversoneva to give stargazing tours to guests at the observatory in the evenings and had a wonderful trip (the trip was gifted in exchange for the stargazing evenings, I was not required to make this video but wanted to anyway!) – check out the resort here: https://soneva.com/resorts/soneva-fushi/
My previous astrotourism videos to the Maldives and beyond – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUfW7Sz3Fq2inr0a52duwXJ-
My Mauna Kea vlog from 2015 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oFAe–jxDU
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
