Taking flight: parrots and planes.

Today consisted of driving down the mountain to La Serena's airport. The drive down was spectacular. We drove through a layer of clouds, which I thought was going to be awesome until I realized it was just like fog. In fact, it was the same thing as fog...just higher.

During the drive some parrots flew over the valley. By the quantity, it seemed as though it was a whole flock. They were fantastic in flight. I have never seen such beautifully colored birds in the wild. Unfortunately, I could not get a picture.

In La Serena, there is no radar at the airport, so planes can't land or take off in the fog. Today there was no low-lying fog so the plane could fly out. This hasn't been happening too much in the last few weeks.

After getting to the hotel in Santiago, dinner was had right down the street. The food here in Chile is incredible and ridiculously cheap. I restrict that to the food I've had outside of the observatory. Dinner tonight consisted of chicken stuffed with asparagus and almonds on top of an avocado rizzotto. I'm not even going to try to describe the flavors. I also had pisco sours and strawberries in hazelnut liquor for dessert. It was just such a pleasant meal.

Photographs don't do the sunsets justice.

I find it hard to keep track of dates while observing. The whole inversion of night and day is not something I would want to do for a career.

Since it was all cloudy here for the last two days, I wasn't actually observing. Tonight it's clear, but the air is really turbulent.

Without further ado, an installation of pretty pictures awaits!

Here we see the view (during the day). Not surprisingly, these are The Andes. If you look close enough you can see the lovely dust speck on my lens. I need to get that cleaned.

Anyway, as the days go by the amount of snow on other mountain peaks changes. We get none. This is probably a good thing, even though I like snow.

I'm changing my little blog profile picture to this one. The telescope I'm standing next to in the old one I didn't actually use. This is the telescope I'm using, the CTIO SMARTS 0.9m telescope.

I don't actually look through anything there. I sit in a control room and play with computers to make it do what I want it to. The only time I go up there is to fill the camera with liquid nitrogen to keep it cool and to take silly pictures. Anyway, there's a camera on the end of the telescope that is connected to the control room. That's a quick enough explanation for it.

There are some pretty amusing foxes up on this mountain. They get close enough to humans to beg for food and do cute things like roll around in the parking lot. They are adorable and greet new visitors to the mountain at the shuttle.

The only other animals I've seen are birds (large and small), an ant in my bathroom, and some viscachas that watch the sun set with us.

What is a viscacha? This is, if you can find it near the center of the picture. They're little animals that sit on the rocks and watch the sun set. They look like rabbits. They hop around after the sun sets for a little while. It is pretty cute, I can't deny that.

This is the view (at sunset). If I hadn't taken this picture myself, I probably would call this image fake. The colors are actually more brilliant than this. It's just stunning.

During the different times of the day, the mountains take on different colors. It's really just something that needs to be seen and cannot be described.

To go along with the ridiculous sight above from a few days ago, is last night's wonderful sunset. This has been the best sunset yet. They keep getting better every day. The clouds make it so pretty. However, the clouds prevent observing. Sadly, I think I'd rather have a cloudless sunset. When it's cloudy we resort to playing card games all night. Near the end second consecutive night of clouds, the card playing started to seem excessive.

Sadly, I only saw this next view once. Last night/this morning, my fellow observers had the brilliant idea to stay up until dawn. This sunrise was ridiculous. I thought the sunsets couldn't be described with pictures or words. The sunrises can't even be imagined.

After waking up late and sleeping poorly, I doubt we'll do this again; however, It was entirely worth it.

Observations begin, and I'm already tired with most of the night to go.

Yesterday, after I blogged, a bit of time was spent in La Serena. I went to the market in La Serena with those observing with me and spent some money. I got a few souvenirs. Everything is ridiculously cheap here (really tasty Argentinian steak dinner with a ton of vegetables and three drinks--one of which was water--for about $25).

La Serena is definitely not a thriving city. Travel guides advise against being alone and female in the city. That's interesting because I'll probably have to do this alone at some point. It's really not a bad place, as far as I could tell.

I've had to give up on exchanging money. Today was a holiday so the office that I may have been able to do that in wasn't open. That's the worst thing that's happened thus far. That's not bad.

Today we took the hour and a half drive up to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. About half of that was spent driving on a long, winding mountain road. It was spectacular. The view is fantastic. The mountains have the slightest hints of red and orange in them, barely noticeable in this photograph. It doesn't hold a candle to Roussillon, France because the colors aren't as striking.

We watched the sun set after dinner, and it turned all of the rocks this brilliant shade of red in the fading light.

I am now in the middle of the first night of observing. I am not about to complain. I am in Chile at an observatory. This situation is amazing.

It is rather chilly in Chile.

I have arrived in Chile!

La Serena was only three flights away from Newark. Only.
We did get to watch the sun rise over the Andes on the long flight from Atlanta to Santiago.

I am beyond tired and am about to head into La Serena for a little exploring. The only problem is that I brought money to exchange at the observatory, and the lady that might be in charge of that is nowhere to be found. Then again, they might not even exchange money here anymore. No one seems to know if this can occur or not.

More to come!

A long weekend of eating, or my trip to Chicago

I had been to Chicago only briefly a few times before. Once was an astronomy club field trip to Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and an afternoon in Chicago. The two other visits I had been in O'Hare International Airport for obvious reasons. I really like the crazy tunnel between terminals (mimicked in North Carolina's Charlotte airport).

This time, I got a long weekend. I spent the weekend with one of my roommates from my senior year of college. Her quaint apartment in Lincoln Park was very welcoming.

My flight from Philadelphia was delayed, so I finally got to her apartment sometime around midnight. It didn't take me too long to find my way out of the airport to the train station. I was impressed with my city-navigation skills.

Since my hostess has a real job, I was left alone the next day (Friday). I went to Lincoln Park, which I found on the first try. I wandered around one of the ponds for a while and came upon the zoo. Lincoln Park has a bunch of areas to roam. Before entering the zoo, I stopped the Lily Pool where I smelled some lovely fragrant trees and watched some ducks and turtles.

After the Lily Pool, I found the zoo. I commend Chicago highly for having the sense to make the zoo free. It's really a brilliant idea. I walked around looking at various animals and found my way to a plant conservatory that was filled with some stunning plants, including a whole room of orchids (some--not those pictured--smelled like coconut).

I spent much of the day wandering around the zoo. At the end of it all, I felt much like this tiger.

I met up with my kind hostess, Stephanie, for dinner. We had the best potato pancakes ever as well as the largest matzo ball in matzo ball soup (Frances' Deli). After being sufficiently stuffed we watched a movie then got ice cream. Good planning.

On Saturday, we visited Chicago's farmers' market that's held in Lincoln Park. We waited for something like an hour to get fresh crèpes. It was entirely worth the wait.

The Art Institute of Chicago was the next stop. The draw was taking tacky Ferris-Buehler-inspired photographs (staring deeply at pointillism and such). We looked into some Van Gogh then headed to the children's book illustrations and photography exhibits.

The next stop was Cloud Gate and Millenium Park. We walked around some fountains and statues. There was then a series of ridiculous photographs taken in front of Cloud Gate...The Bean. I include a tame one--namely one only of The Bean.

After that it was time to find some Chicago-style pizza, which we annihilated. Another movie was watched that night as we were pretty much useless from the cold and the over-eating.

Sunday saw a trip downtown to take an architecture boat tour on the Chicago River. We took a lot of pictures of buildings. The tour guide was extremely knowledgable and probably commented on every building we passed. I enjoyed this one because the yellow dome is a dirigible dock. Seriously.

The boat took us to the lock to the Lake Michigan and we had a brief glimpse of the lake and Navy Pier. I'd been to Navy Pier on a previous visit so we skipped that attraction.

We visited the larger-than-life American Gothic statue and took a series of ridiculous pictures there, too (I am tying his shoe).

Then we went to the Hancock building and stared up at it. Another time I will go to the top. That was followed by more eating: cupcakes and Mexican take-out.

I left Monday after breakfast wishing that I could stay longer. I quite enjoyed my visit to both my friend and Chicago. I will have to return to see both again.