Chile

OK, so I've been in Chile for about 24 hours (counting as when I reached CTIO's compound, not counting when I stepped off the plane and into customs. I'm at the mounttop now, Cerro Tolollo, and the views are magnificant. I had lunch sitting in the back of the cafeteria looking at the Andes out the bay windows. I'm so lucky being an astronomer, I get to go to places with magnificant views, and then ignore then to stay up all night looking at specs of light. There are lots of telescopes, here at CTIO there are the 4 meter, the 1.5 meter, the Schmidt telescope (not sure how big, can google to find out) the 1 meter I'll be using, the 0.9 meter, and a bunch of smaller scopes. Chile and international astronomers have worked out a good compromise, there are telescopes all over (on the next mountain top there are teh 8m GEMINI South telescope and the 4.5 meter SOAR telescope) and Chilean astronomers get some fraction of the time, and lots of people are employed helping teh local economies. I had dinner with an astronomer last night and he showed me some of the local sites while taking me for dinner, and he made the comment that when he moved down there someone else told him "welcome to the upper class". The local standard of living is obvioiusly a lot different, but most of the houses in La Serena (the provential capital of a few hundred thousand) were neat and well taken care of if painted garish colors, but just about *every* house had a metal bar fence around it. There are people juggling for tips, and the local beggars help you "unpark" for a few hundred Chilean Pesos (about 500 CP to the dollar these days).

Dinner is in about 10 minutes, then I'll drive to where the telescopes are. I walked there this afternoon and was sucking wind pretty badly by the time I got there, 7000 ft is pretty thin air compared to what I'm used to. They feed us three times a day, and the first meal was very good. Fish soup and pork kebabs. The food is nicely flavorful, which means Pam would probably be running to the water fountain to drink while crying "hot hot hot!". :) I think I'll be in trouble for that one when I get back. :)

There are still a decent amount of clouds, so I'm not sure I'll be able to do my photometry, but as long as it isn't actively raining I'll take data. I may not be able to do anything useful with the data, but may as well take some.

Anyone out there have a question they would like answered?