Michael has done a photoshooting at the Atacama desert
Michael has travelled several weeks through the chilenian Atacama desert taking pictures for his "outer space series". On this challenging and adventureous trip Michael has been given the rare opportunity to photograph the extraordinary new ALMA telescope. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, it is the largest astronomical project on the planet, it was inaugurated this year. ALMA is a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed of 66 high precision antennas located on the Chajnantor plateau, at 5200 meters altitude in northern Chile. ALMA is expected to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation.
Michael also photographed the Very Large Telescope (VLT) which is the flagship facility for European ground-based astronomy at the beginning of the third Millennium. Currently under construction at ESO Paranal cleanroom is a revolutionary new integral field spectrograph of unprecedented power called MUSE, which was also portrayed by Michael.
After one week with the cutting edge telescopes Michael worked for several days at the "mars and moon valley" where NASA and ESA are testing their future generations of moon and mars rovers. With special thanks to Laura Ventura and Francisco Rodríguez from ESO.