On 13 March 2013 the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -the largest ground-based astronomical project in the world- will be inaugurated, marking the transition from construction project to fully fledged observatory. To enable people around the world to witness first-hand this exciting milestone in humanity’s quest to understand the cosmos, a live video stream of the inauguration will be webcast from the observatory’s Operations Support Facility, at an altitude of 2900 meters in the Chilean Andes.

The stream of the day’s events will run from 14:30 UT to around 16:00 UT. The stream will be available on the day at http://www.almaobservatory.org/inauguration/

The President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, along with hundreds of guests including representatives from the global scientific community, current and former ALMA personnel and its executives, as well as the communities located near ALMA, will celebrate the success of the project. The latest results from this state-of-the-art observatory will also be presented.

Figure: Antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two companion galaxies to our own Milky Way galaxy, can be seen as bright smudges in the night sky, in the centre of the photograph.
Credit: ESO/C.Malin