Urania

Well, after a bit of a bumpy start, this observing run has gone reasonably well. We think we will be able to get the spectra don of several hundred stars, some over 150,000 times fainter than the human eye (in dark skies) can see. We managed to do this in all of our planned fields except one, which we had to drop after the attack of the telescope gremlins mentioned in a previous post.  After that first tramautic night, this has actually become a rather “routine” affair, as we spend 50 minutes at a time on one field, then have to scramble to shoot some calibrations or re-configure the fibers on the spectrograph.

It will take us a good chunk of the summer to know what the results of this run actually are, such is the nature of astronomical data, but all in all, this feels like it has been a very productive run. In addition to the “science objectives” of this trip,  I have seen some of the darkest skies imaginable.  Since my interest in astronomy started by my attempts as a 6 to 7 year old to understand our place in the vastness of that sky, it has also been somewhat fulfilling to the soul to see the Universe in this way, the way humans saw it before the advent of artificial lighting.  Call this Chicken Soup for the Astronomer’s Soul.

That said, I am now ready to go back home to my family who I miss and my students whom I have to guide to finals. Just a few more hours, another short 5 hours of sleep, than I take the carryall to La Serena. Dr. Humphreys, my collaborator, will give a talk there tomorrow afternoon. We’ll do dinner afterward, and then tomorrow, I start the 24 hours of flights and connections it will take to get me home.