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.