So I'm approaching Barroubin. Been on the dirt road for about an hour. These mountains are extremely rugged, almost Mars-like.

This is Amir Suraj. You might recognize his voice. He's been on the show a couple of times before.

The very first time I chatted with a mirror, you just discovered the possibility of Earth's first

interstellar meteor, that is an object originating

from outside of our solar system,

the first one we've been able to record crashing

into the Earth's atmosphere.

So we talked about that.

Then the next time we talked to Amir,

he'd gone out looking for that meteor

on a 30-foot catamaran in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

scouring the sea floor for teeny tiny pieces of this exploded

interstellar meteorite.

So it's fair to say Amir gets around, despite being pretty young and having not that long ago graduated

from his astrophysics program as well as getting his music degree.

So perhaps it will not surprise you that today we find a mere ascending up

a mountain in the middle of the Atticama desert in Chile, visiting one of the most powerful

astronomical observation instruments ever built.

We finally broke through the cloud layer.

The sun is beaming through and I caught a couple quick glimpses of the telescope.

And it made me start to tear up. It looks like it's like a spaceship

on this extraordinarily majestic perch. I'm Doolan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and wondrous places.

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