The world's driest non-polar desert (and its oldest of any kind) is the closest you can get to walking on the moon without leaving Earth. The lunar-like landscapes of the Atacama Desert, which spans around 600 miles of western Chile between the Pacific coast and the Andes Mountains, were even used by NASA to test equipment for outer space.

Far from being a lifeless abyss, it is marked by lakes, salt flats, volcanoes, geysers, and dancing dark skies.

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