Observing at Las Campanas, Chile

September 13-17, 2005

I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Chile with two other students to see, learn and use one of the largest telescopes available. Abby is the student who actually obtained the time on the telescope for her scientific proposal; Simon is a PhD student who was our mentor as we learned how to collect data at the telescope. So here we are at the Atlanta airport as we prepare to depart for Chile.
After a long 9-hour flight overnight, we approach Santiago with the sun rising over the Andes mountains. Somewhere out in those mountains lies our home away from home.



When we arrived in Santiago, we had a hop another flight back north to La Serena. The headquarters for the observatory is there and is where we would catch the van to travel up the moutain road to Las Campanas. It is interesting to note that the airport in La Serena only has one runway and only one ramp -- and we were flying in a Boing 737. So after landing and coasting down the runway, the pilot has to turn the plane around on a dime ON THE RUNWAY to head back to the exit point. I've never seen that done before. We were met at the airport by a representative of Las Campanas and he took us back to the main office where we waited for the van to take us up the mountain. Since we had a little time, we took a few pictures of the area. We even met up with a friend of Simon's named Stephen who is a postdoc living in La Serena and working for CTIO.




Finally, we loaded in the van and took the 2-hour drive up the mountain to Las Campanas. Here are a few shots of the facilities at Las Campanas and the surrounding gorgeous landscape. A couple of pictures you may can tell were taken from my dorm room showing the view I got to wake up to each AFTERNOON (remember, we stay up all night observing!).









Now for the telescopes! As you can see, there are two telescopes exactly alike! Each has different instrumentation for different types of observing.




The telescope has a 6.5m (about 21 feet diameter) mirror! To give you an idea how big that is, here I am (that's me in the bright orange :-) standing at the back of the mirror (the large white circle is the cell that holds the mirror):



Here we all are in front of the mirror this time.



Here are a couple of more pictures of the telescope (that's me standing on the support deck where the spiffy spectroscope is located):



While it was freezing and windy outside, we were all cozy in the telescope control room.