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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!

For excellent pictures of the James Bond style residencia, visit this site:
Residencia@paranal

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.