AOS panorama

These brilliant blue, cloudless skies — perfect for astronomy — can only be found in extreme conditions. This is the Chajnantor plateau, at 5000 metres above sea-level. The squat, grey building to the left is the Array Operations Site (AOS) Technical Building, the second highest building in the world.

The tiny white structures dotted around the panorama are antennas that make up the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based astronomy project in existence.