www.thegilmours.co.uk

Hello from the Atacama desert, where the sun always shines. I’m up at the telescopes at Paranal, learning the trade and generally being bewildered by acronyms. This is my first shift - 8 days on the mountain, on day shifts at the moment. Paranal is a fantastic place - over 100 people in a James Bond style building over 140km from the nearest
(moderate) civilisation. And even further to the nearest decent plant-life.

I arrived here on friday, after a 6 hour journey in a plane and across the desert. It is surreal to travel for hours without seeing anything except sand, rocks and burst tyres. Your mind keeps playing tricks on you, thinking that a rock is a sheep, house, anything really…. . I’m staying in the resedencia, which is about 5km from the telescopes, and caters for over 100 people. It is built into the hilside, almost underground, with a big glass dome and tropical trees. There’s even a swimming pool, to rehumidify the living area, as it gets very very dry here.

The telescopes are amazing. Take a look at this gallery for some pics. It takes a lot of people to run the telescopes and instruments and do all the maintenance, installations and fixing bits. At the moment I’m learning about the day time science operations of UT2, the second telescope. It’s mostly taking calibration images (such as blank images) and checking that everything has worked OK during the night. It’s interesting work, but long days (typically 12 hours) and there’s a lot to learn. In a couple of months I’ll start training on night shifts too.

In the mean time I’ve got another 5 days here, then I’m back to santiago to see my dear husband (who will have washed up by then!) and get on with house hunting.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Rachel's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.