Posts
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Big Telescope and Little Galaxies
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.
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A Weekend at Viña Chillán
Birthday winery trip! That pretty much sums up the weekend. A fellow postdoc decided to celebrate another trip around the Sun with an overnight at Viña Chillán, an hour from Concepción.
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Grabbing Information on Recent Earthquakes from the Internet
It goes without saying that Chile has a fair number of earthquakes. Here in Concepción we seem to feel a reasonably sized earthquake (M4.5–5) every 1–2 months. So, I wanted a quick and easy way to check for information about earthquakes from publicly available data sources.
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Hiking in Valle Cochamó
“It is the Yosemite of Chile.” That was all that was needed to pique my interest in Valle Cochamó. Everything further I was told just emphasized that I needed to get there soon.
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Fly fishing the Rio Maullín
My postdoc sponsor here in Chile had spent months organizing a conference near Puerto Varas, in the South of Chile. Months prior to the conference, I was speaking with some of the invited speakers and the topic of fishing came up. And indeed, during the week of the conference, fishing came up again, and I was invited to join three fellow astronomers for an afternoon of fly fishing outside town. I had never fly fished before, but had been told it was a fun sport (especially compared to bait fishing, which I find fairly boring).