Stéphane Guisard is an optical engineer at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, where the skies are so dark that on a clear moonless night it is possible to see your shadow cast by the light of the Milky Way alone. He is also an astrophotographer. His website, Los Cielos de América, has images of the starry night sky in high resolution, with animation, even in 3D. His work is featured at TWAN (The World At Night) and NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.
My favorite page of Los Cielos is Chimborazo Volcano (Ecuador) “The closest place to the stars”: “With an altitude of 6268 meters (20564 ft) above sea level, Chimborazo volcano is the highest summit in Ecuador but of course not the highest summit on the planet. This record belongs to Mount Everest (8848 metres / 29029 ft above sea level). However, because the Earth is not a perfect sphere but rather an oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator) and that Chimborazo is very close to the equator line (only -1 degree in latitude), Chimborazo is known as the “the farthest location from the center of the Earth”. 6384.687 Km against 6382.467 Km for Everest that is, a difference of 2.220 Km/1.38 miles.
Ecuatorian people will kindly and proudly remind you about this fact “Chimborazo, el punto mas lejano del centro de la Tierra”. I will personally proudly (and kindly as well) give you my version of it : “Chimborazo : El punto mas cercano a las estrellas”, (“Chimborazo : the closest place to the stars”) hoping that the following image manages to illustrate it.”
Yes, closer to heaven requires a thin atmosphere and desert light. May we break on free to the other side.