Scientists Find The Best Place on Earth For Viewing The Night Sky, But There's a Catch - ScienceAlert

"A telescope located at Dome A could out-perform a similar telescope located at any other astronomical site on the planet," says Paul Hickson, an astronomer from the University of British Columbia (UBC).

"The combination of high altitude, low temperature, long periods of continuous darkness, and an exceptionally stable atmosphere, makes Dome A a very attractive location for optical and infrared astronomy.

If you truly want to see further into the depths of space and time, you'd need to escape the nearest part of the atmosphere called the boundary layer.

In this corner of the globe, atmosphere conditions can provide astronomical seeing regular figures as low as around 0.66 arc seconds.

Hickson and his colleagues measured the astronomical seeing at Dome A's Kunlun Station, a Chinese research outpost already regarded as an appealing site for astronomers.

"After a decade of indirect evidence and theoretical reasoning, we finally have direct observational proof of the extraordinarily good conditions at Dome A," says astronomer Michael Ashley from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Before you pack your woollies and your trusty old telescope for a night of star gazing, you should know the conditions on Dome A don't just threaten frostbite.