Last week I had the great opportunity to spend three nights at Las Campanas Observatory, using one of the 6.5m Magellan Telescopes. I was joining two collaborators, Sabrina and Sandy, from the University of Virginia Astronomy Department, and met them in the Santiago airport after their flight from the US. They had been awarded the telescope time through UVa’s access and I was joining them to help out as-needed.

I was pretty excited to be going up North, as this was my first trip to an observatory in Chile. The landscape was very different from the South – far fewer trees and a much drier climate (perfect for telescopes!). In addition to the observatory seen on the flight in (Cerro Tololo), we also passed La Silla Observatory, which shares a portion of its access road with Las Campanas.

The focus of the observing run was dwarf galaxies which are interacting / merging with each other. The specific galaxies we observed were selected from the TiNy Titans project. All-in-all the observations went fairly well and we managed to get good data on most of our targets. However, the observing was fairly exhausting: we woke up around noon to eat lunch, then went to the telescope at 1430 to take calibration data, dinner at 1830, then back to the telescope until 0800 or so the next morning. I had missed observing, but am not sure I could have gone for more than two or three nights, at that pace. The minute-to-minute operations were fairly standard, as far as I am used to. Sandy and Sabrina took care of most of the hands-on observing, and I chimed in or helped out as needed. That left me free to spend much of the night working on proposals for the ALMA radio telescope proposal deadline, which was a few days after our observing run.

Here are a few photos from the trip, but if you’d like to check out others, see my Las Campanas Observatory tagged photos.

Image for Out the back of the truck
Image for Walking to the Telescope
Image for Observing
Image for Me with Baade
Image for Sunset at Las Campanas

We were also treated to a nice fiew of Aconcagua (the highest mountain in the Americas) on the flight back to Santiago:

Image for Aconcagua

Update: Sabrina has a post on the observing run, over at Las Campanas Belles.