Photo courtesy of Pascalou petit - Wikipedia.org
Pic du Midi Observatory... Last Tuesday, I was at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore when I read about this interesting astronomical location in a special issue of Astronomy magazine. Pic du Midi Observatory, or Observatoire du Pic du Midi de Bigorre, is situated on a 9,439 feet-tall mountain in France. Construction initially began in 1878...with more than six instruments (including both telescopes and coronographs) built at the observatory since then. Among these instruments was a 42-inch telescope that was installed at the site courtesy of NASA (which provided funding) in 1963, and was used to take detailed images of the Moon's surface in preparation for the Apollo missions.
Photo courtesy of Svein-Magne Tunli - Wikipedia.org
The Pic du Midi Observatory is in such a remote location in the French Pyrenees that cable cars need to be used to reach the site. Although this observatory was featured (under a different name) in the video game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Pic du Midi de Bigorre has yet to be seen in a movie...at least none that I know of. This may possibly be due to the fact that the location is only accessible by cable cars—and they may not be strong enough to lift heavy stacks of film equipment up to the observatory. That, and if there's an emergency during filming, good luck in getting the injured cast or crew member to a hospital ASAP. Of course, that's where helicopters come along.
Photo courtesy of physics4me
Along with the Dokdo islands in the Sea of Japan, Pic du Midi de Bigorre is another place that I wouldn't mind traveling to. It's just amazing to read about man-made structures that are built in the remotest of locations on Earth (Of course, research centers in Antarctica—such as the U.S. McMurdo Station—would be too obvious to blog about in this case). However, I take issue when a man-made structure is built in a location that shouldn't be disturbed for environmental reasons...such as the Amazon rain forest, or the Arctic. I'll leave it at that. No need to start talking like a Greenpeace hippie in this entry. Carry on.
Photo courtesy of be*curious - Flickr.com
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