This invited talk was the one that opened the congress, that was held at the Universidad Galileo in Guatemala City.

Jesús Gallego reviewed our conception of the cosmos, since the beginning of humanity, the firmament has always attracted us as something distant and unreachable. From the sphere of fixed stars in the book “Del saber de la Astronomía” by Alfonso X, “the Wise”, to the large astronomical telescopes of today, the history of astronomy is based on the constant effort to know the nature of the increasingly remote universe that our instruments reveal to us. Jesús concluded by explaining what is currently known about the most remote universe.