My last day there happened to be a Saturday when tours of the historic observatory just happen to occur. I woke up absurdly early (for an observer) to go on this tour. The tour guide told some pretty horrible jokes and made a handful of wrong comments about science and telescopes. When he was going over how CHARA works (the set of six telescopes that I use), he commented that observers don't even need to come to the mountain because there are telescope operators. This distressed me; observers have to come to take the data. The telescope operators operate the six telescopes; we operate the instruments that take the data.
Anyway, after the tour and before I descended, I went to my favorite spot on the mountain. Here is a picture from earlier in the week of the view from that spot.
...and then I smelled some trees. The ponderosa pine smells like vanilla or butterscotch.
Since I was pretty much a waste of space on Sunday from trying to get back to a day schedule (which failed), I wandered around CalTech's campus in Pasadena. The whole place smelled nice from all of the flowers. I then proceeded to find various places to sit for several hours with a book. I particularly enjoyed the pond with lots of turtles.
And now...I'm back in Mountain View after a very long morning of travel. This will be the longest stretch that I'm in the same place this summer. When it ends in just over three weeks, I will be on my way to Yosemite, Mount Wilson (again), Michigan's Arizona observatory (MDM), and then back to LA before returning to Mountain View for just over a week, ending my stay in California for the summer.
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