ALMA and friends

Apolonia Rodrigues (Dark Sky Alqueva Coordinator) and Miguel Claro (Astrophotographer) pose in front of one of the 66 dishes that make up the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). But they and the dish are dwarfed in every respect by the majesty of the Milky Way snaking across the skies above the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. ALMA is designed to observe the Universe at wavelengths in between infra-red and radio waves, from which we can learn about the coldest regions of the Universe, where new stars are just forming, and about the earliest galaxies.