Hello there! Welcome to another installment of my life in Chile. Well it's down to week number seven and I will be leaving to the US soon. Hmmm, I will miss it here. I have some goodies in store so without any further delay...
Well, one more delay... I think I shall forego the Monday tea to go on to bigger things... actually I missed most of it since I had a homework assignment that needed to be scanned and posted before 11AM! I had spent the night before working on it... I slacked!
ENTER: The Bigger Things!
Trees! Those are big, I think this shall be a tree week! I went to the mountain on Tuesday. I participated in the Engineering run on the 4 meter telescope... also known as the Blanco Telescope. It was absolutely splendid. I got there and had lunch, the cooks are so nice to me, being a vegetarian and all. They always have excellent food for me. Sometimes I get separate dishes! It is so nice. Anyway, the first day was spent trying to figure out some bug in the code for a new control system in the RC Spectrograph. I had some bugs in my own Fortran program to weed out too. The bugs persisted and the Engineering crew retired for the evening around 2AM. I headed to the other telescopes to hang out and see what I could get into.
At the .9 meter I met Kaspar from U of Mich. He was looking at some binaries in Globular Clusters... he is a really nice guy, we played some basketball during long integration times. There is a small court IN the 4 meter facility. At the Schmidt I met Kira from NASA. She was looking at satelites. It was interesting. I got to help the guys set up the site seeing telescope. It's a tiny Mead or Celestron 8 or 10 inch scope with an autonomous program that calculates the seeing for Cerro Tololo. It's really neat-o! They are putting one up on Cerro Pachon where Gemini is and they were calibrating it on Tololo to make the measurements consistent and to see if there are any differences between the sites' seeing. The sun rose and I helped Kaspar shut down the .9 meter, then I went to bed.
Night schedule rocks! Wake up at 2PM and go to lunch, mmm. I got to hear and see Arlin Crotts' talk on Supernova 1987A. Isn't modern technology wonderful? Wednesday we tried to iron out the rest of the programming bugs. There were also some problems with other things. Eventually we got to try out the telescope and take some spectra, we hit a couple of objects. One galaxy, two quasars (simultaneously), and a newly detected Nova! It was fun. I got to use the controls and do all that jazz. Before I was able to go down to the Cass Cage! It was fun. I visited Kira and saw the famous Six Pack, six satellites that are about the same place in orbit around the Earth. My trip to Cerro Tololo came to an end and I headed back to La Serena. So what does this have to do with trees? Well, trees are grand things, the 4 meter is a grand thing; now the tree has roots that support it and bring it nutrients, the roots of the 4 meter are the engineering technicians and they, like the roots are concealed from the flourishing leaves that are the astronomers... ok, that was pretty mushy.
Onward, this week I updated the last weeks page with a link to the creature page. It's also been updated to include the name of it! Woo hoo! Ok this has nothing to do with trees. Hmmm. Oh, I remember something now, I got back Thursday and played some basketball with Jim DeBuizer, he's like a tree at 6 feet 10 inches! Well, he went up and I went for the rebound, it's the only thing I could hope for. He made the shot and then came down on my shoulder, elbow first. It didn't hurt at the time but the next morning... oh agony, agony!
So we learned about applying for graduate school on Friday, the second to last installment of the Astronomy Class, there were pictures on one handout with some guys plowing a garden or something... I think they might have been planting trees! There's a tree reference. The Friday we had the Super Gigante Asiado at Casa 13! It was our cookout for the staff at CTIO. It was also the celebration of the birthdays of Gabe Bramer(March 2nd) and Shay Holmes(Feb 29th!). So we had some food and some music. It lasted till about 2AM, my advisor was the last official grown-up to leave. My creature made a cameo and stole the show for a brief moment. The petrified tree forest was brought up in a conversation.
Finally, I remember some trees between here and Coquimbo that have tons of these black geese looking birds on them and they just chill out. I found them on a walk down Cisternas. I kept walking till the road became a dirt road then I took a right and stumbled upon these farms near the coast. They were beautiful and a small creek lined with trees ran through the property. I saw a couple of lizards on that walk. Little ones with stripes and they ran fast. I tried to capture them... geez, the wildlife will probably be happy when I am gone. Anyway, there were the trees with the birds at the end of this road I ended up on. The trees where leafless. Perhaps even dead, mere skeletons of the shade providers they once were, but they are home providers now, and nurseries for these birds that have flocked to it and made nest and raised young. Man I am getting all mushy this week... perhaps I know my time here is winding down...