Wise acknowledges that Northumberland needs to do more to capitalise on its scarce resource and believes the region needs a couple more observatories to ensure that visitors will see what they came for.
Several top-level observatories have set up home here, and tourists are hot on their tail.
La Serena is a quiet town, near a number of observatories offering stargazing in the Atacama desert – an incredible experience which was certainly one of the highlights of my South American experience.
The UK will have to go some way to eclipse northern Chile, which boasts more than a dozen tourist observatories and has some of the clearest skies in the world.
These moored observatories, though, can reach out beyond the range of their fixed instruments using robots.Most of these robots are torpedo-shaped ocean gliders (one of which is pictured above) that "fly" long distances through the sea, sampling sunlight penetration, chlorophyll and oxygen concentrations, and the density, pressure, temperature and salinity of the water.
Each of these observatories will sit at one corner of a triangular study area with sides up to 62km long, the other corners of which are occupied by fixed daughter stations.
Both will measure processes such as upwelling (important for the recycling of nutrients that have fallen to the seabed), oxygen depletion (which is often caused by pollution), and the dramatic changes in water temperature, salinity and currents that happen where the continental shelf dives into the abyss.The remaining four observatories are stationed in deeper water.
They are weak, but if the accelerating object has enough mass it should be possible to spot them.Scientists at several new ground-based observatories are hoping to do just that.
The story follows the team members as they race to mountain-top observatories in Arizona, Hawaii and Chile, desperately trying to outsmart a competing team of researchers.
While particle-physics colliders and space-based observatories could rule out some of the more exotic versions of each, no one has been able to suggest a way to decide between them in general.Having two candidates for a theory of everything is almost as upsetting to physicists as their inability to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity in the first place.
One such collaboration is GOODS, or the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, in which Spitzer worked with Chandra and Hubble to look in detail at a small patch of sky.
