www.thegilmours.co.uk

It’s my last day on the mountain! This evening (or early tomorrow morning if the plane is late) I’ll be back with my lovely husband, in a nice clean flat (hint hint). It’s been an interesting 8 days. A lot less tiring now than it was at the beginning, and I’m getting to know some people, although probably next time I come there will be a different set on duty. Each day/night there are about 30 different people around the control room, and they all do different shifts, so it will take quite some time to learn who everyone is.

Strangely, the first people I met at lunch on my first day were from Edinburgh! The project management for the VISTA telescope (the new Visible and Infra-red Survey Telescope, I’m not sure about the ‘A’) is from the Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh, so there are a couple of folk out here now supervising the construction of the dome. The telescope itself is being built in Texas, and will be here in a couple of months.

I have been carrying on learning about the calibration data and the different instruments. In 8 days I haven’t broken anything (yet - only 3 hrs to go). I’ve also managed to get a bit of science done, as it’s been quite quiet this week - various telescopes have been upgraded and tested so there has been less observing. There have been teething problems, but not much that I can do as a trainee. I have a feeling my next shift won’t be quite so straight forward.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2005 at 10:53 am 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.