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The Antofagasta Region is one of Chile's sixteen first-order administrative divisions. The second-largest region of Chile in area, it comprises three provinces, Antofagasta, El Loa and Tocopilla. It is bordered to the north by Tarapacá, by Atacama to the south, and to the east by Bolivia and Argentina. The region's capital is the port city of Antofagasta; another one of its important cities is Calama. The region's main economic activity is copper mining in its giant inland porphyry copper systems.
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers was a German physician and astronomer.
Alphonse Louis Nicolas Borrelly was a French astronomer.
David Howard Levy is a Canadian amateur astronomer, science writer and discoverer of comets and minor planets, who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1993, which collided with the planet Jupiter in 1994.
Alexandre Schaumasse (1882–1958) was a French astronomer and discoverer of comets and minor planets.
Edward L. G. "Ted" Bowell, is an American astronomer. Bowell was educated at Emanuel School London, University College, London, and the University of Paris.
Calama is a city and commune in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It is the capital of El Loa Province, part of the Antofagasta Region. Calama is one of the driest cities in the world with average annual precipitation of just 5 mm (0.20 in). The River Loa, Chile's longest, flows through the city. Calama has a population of 147,886.
San Pedro de Atacama is a Chilean town and commune in El Loa Province, Antofagasta Region. It is located east of Antofagasta, some 106 km (60 mi) southeast of Calama and the Chuquicamata copper mine, overlooking the Licancabur volcano. It features a significant archeological museum, the R. P. Gustavo Le Paige Archaeological Museum, with a large collection of relics and artifacts from the region. Native ruins nearby attract increasing numbers of tourists interested in learning about pre-Columbian cultures.
Los Flamencos National Reserve is a nature reserve located in the commune of San Pedro de Atacama, Antofagasta Region of northern Chile. The reserve covers a total area of 740 square kilometres (290 sq mi) in the Central Andean dry puna ecoregion and consists of seven separate sections.
The Atacama myotis is a species of vesper bat in the family Vespertilionidae. It is found in Chile and Peru, an example ecoregion of occurrence being the Chilean matorral.
The Atacama people, also called Atacameño, are indigenous people from the Atacama Desert and altiplano region in the north of Chile and Argentina and southern Bolivia, mainly Antofagasta Region.
152188 Morricone, provisional designation 2005 QP51, is a background asteroid from the central region of the asteroid belt, approximately 3 kilometers (2 miles) in diameter. It was discovered on 27 August 2005, by astronomers Franco Mallia and Alain Maury at the Campo Catino Austral Observatory (CAO), San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, a robotic station of the Italian Campo Catino Astronomical Observatory. The asteroid was named for Italian composer Ennio Morricone.
The Atacama Desert is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,600 km (990 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains. The Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the world, and the second driest overall, just behind some very specific spots within the McMurdo Dry Valleys as well as the only hot true desert to receive less precipitation than the polar deserts, and the largest fog desert in the world. Both regions have been used as experimentation sites on Earth for Mars expedition simulations. The Atacama Desert occupies 105,000 km2 (41,000 sq mi), or 128,000 km2 (49,000 sq mi) if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes (salares), sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes.
The Salta–Antofagasta railway, also named Huaytiquina, is a non-electrified single track railway line that links Argentina and Chile passing through the Andes. It is a 1,000 mmmetre gauge railway with a total length of 941 km, connecting the city of Salta (Argentina) to the one of Antofagasta (Chile), on the Pacific Ocean, passing through the Puna de Atacama and Atacama Desert.
Michel Ory is a Swiss amateur astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets and comets.
The minor planet and centaur 10199 Chariklo, with a diameter of about 250 kilometres (160 mi), is the smallest celestial object with confirmed rings and the fifth ringed celestial object discovered in the Solar System, after the gas giants and ice giants. Orbiting Chariklo is a bright ring system consisting of two narrow and dense bands, 6–7 km (4 mi) and 2–4 km (2 mi) wide, separated by a gap of 9 kilometres (6 mi). The rings orbit at distances of about 400 kilometres (250 mi) from the centre of Chariklo, a thousandth the distance between Earth and the Moon. The discovery was made by a team of astronomers using ten telescopes at various locations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay in South America during observation of a stellar occultation on 3 June 2013, and was announced on 26 March 2014.
The Battle of Río Grande was a minor military engagement that took place on 10 September 1879, during the War of the Pacific. A picket of Chilean soldiers and a Bolivian montonera clashed in Rio Grande, around San Pedro de Atacama. Bolivians are defeated, which eliminates local resistance to Chilean occupation in the Litoral Department.
2021 AV7 is a near-Earth asteroid of the Apollo group, discovered by astronomers Alain Maury and G. Attard at San Pedro de Atacama, Chile on 15 January 2021. With an estimated diameter of 450–1,000 m (1,480–3,280 ft), it is considered a potentially hazardous asteroid. It has a highly elliptical orbit that brings it within Earth's orbit. Although its nominal orbit has a small minimum orbit intersection distance around 70,000 km (43,000 mi) from Earth's orbital path, the asteroid does not make any close approaches within 0.2 astronomical units (30×106 km; 19×106 mi) over the next 100 years.
C/2021 J1 (Maury-Attard) is a Halley-type comet discovered on May 9, 2021, by French amateur astronomers Alain Maury and Georges Attard with the MAP (Maury/Attard/Parrott) observation program. It is the first comet discovered with the synthetic tracking technique, made possible with the Tycho Tracker commercial software developed by Daniel Parrott. When it was discovered, it had a magnitude of 19.
2023 DW is a near-Earth asteroid of the Aten group. It is approximately 50 meters in diameter, roughly the size of the asteroid that caused the Tunguska event, and was discovered by Georges Attard and Alain Maury, from the MAP (Maury/Attard/Parrott) asteroid search program in San Pedro de Atacama on 26 February 2023, when it was 0.07 AU (10 million km) from Earth. On 28 February 2023, with an observation arc of 1.2 days, it was rated 1 on the Torino scale for a virtual impactor on 14 February 2046 at 21:36 UTC. The nominal approach is expected to occur about 6.5 hours before the impact scenario at 14 February 2046 15:10 ± 11 hours. With a Palermo scale rating of –1.89, the odds of impact are about 78 times less than the background hazard level. Between 5–8 March, the asteroid was not observed as it was within 40 degrees of the waxing gibbous moon.
