Observatorio Manuel Foster

This guide to Observatorio Manuel Foster in Santiago follows the Lick Observatory astronomers who set a telescope on this ridge of Cerro San Cristóbal in 1903 to catch southern starlight, and the bronze Virgin statue workers began raising on the same hill the very next year. It traces the observatory's public opening in 1986, when ordinary visitors watched Halley's Comet through the eyepiece, and the decades of measurement that mapped how our own sun moves through the Milky Way. Stand at the dome and you can look either way, down at the glass or up toward the statue.