www.thegilmours.co.uk

This morning I learnt a bit about an instrument called SINFONI (made up of the AO and SPIFFI - I have acronyms coming out of my ears!).
It splits the light from the telescope into 32 slices, and then finds the spectrum of each slice. The result is a spectrum at each point in a 32 x 32 grid, so that you can see what elements are present at each point in the image. It’s a bit hard to explain - see http://www.eso.org/instruments/sinfoni/overview.html for a picture if you’re interested. It’s very clever. In addition it uses adaptive optics, which means that the telescope mirror bends to compensate for the flickering due to the atmosphere. The resolution is amazing - especially if like me you’re used to X-ray images, where almost everything is a dot.

It’s strange working in such a multi-cultural environment. I reckon 2/3 of the folk here are Chilean, and the rest mostly european (mostly french speaking). All the paperwork is in english, but the conversations are in a whole range of languages. The food is pretty multicultural too - and very mix and match. This morning one girl had avocado, melon and blue cheese (on it’s own) for breakfast. The only thing I’m missing on the mountain (other than Douglas of course) is a proper cup of tea - they have a few Earl Grey, and lots of fruit teas, but next time I’m going to bring my own bog standard teabags. I can’t do proper work without a good cup of tea!

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