Why doesn't Argentina have more telescopes?
Maybe this lives in showerthoughts, but Chile has a lot of large telescopes and you often hear its because they’re on mountains above clouds. The border with Argentina goes through the middle of the mountains so it seems like it should be a good spot for telescopes too.
I couldn’t find a good reference for why and I was mostly hoping someone would know one. I’m guessing its a combination of:
- Argentina’s hyperinflation
- Chile being the rain shadow side
- Chile has more infrastructure close to the mountains
Looking online it looks like there was political pressure from the US for a telescope in Argentina to stop being built because it had some funding from China.
I’m not surprised to see more in Chile, but there seem to be about seven past and upcoming world class telescopes in Chile and none in Argentina. And this list:
go-astronomy.com/observatories-chile.php
Is a lot longer than was expecting compared to this list:
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