Alma Libre

First update in a week. I haven't actually been slacking--though I admittedly haven't done any real work in a while either. My housemates (program-mates?) and I have been on a midterm excursion of sorts to northern Chile since Saturday, and the internet access has been spotty at best until now. Here's a summary of the trip to date:

Touring this part of the country has been quite an experience, from both the cultural and the astronomical point of view. We flew into Antofagasta and, after a quick stop at an enormous sea arch called La Portada, drove down to the aptly (and very creatively) named Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal in the middle of the Atacama desert. Operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the VLT is composed of four 8.2 m optical telescopes at an altitude of 2,600 m and is one of the most powerful ground-based research telescopes in the world. It was an awesome privilege to be able to tour the facilities and see the telescopes up close, especially since I may end up working at the VLT at some point in my life.

Incidentally, the Atacama desert is the driest desert in the world and was used for the filming of the desert scenes in James Bond: Quantum of Solace. Not that we recognized any landmarks in the barren nothingness.

One anecdote worth mentioning from the VLT trip. A large group of high school girls from Colegio Antofagasta happened to be touring at the same time as us, and while we tried not to pay attention to them at first, this proved to be more and more difficult as they started to take photos of us and laugh as they passed by. By chance, we ended up in the same building later, and they started asking us about ourselves in broken English. Of course, we tried to respond in our broken Spanish, and after a bit of dialogue, they began asking for photos with Victor, Joey, and me (the three tallest guys in the group). That wasn't even the strangest part though. Later, while our group was watching an educational video about the VLT, the girls came back and began demanding photos with--you guessed it--yours truly. I indulged them of course, but I was truly perplexed. Perhaps I was the first Asian they had seen in person? In any case, it was an interesting and humorous experience, but one that I would rather not repeat.

After Paranal, we passed through Calama and went straight to San Pedro de Atacama, a small town of a few thousand inhabitants at most. All of the buildings were made out of adobe bricks and straw, including the hotel where we stayed, and it pretty obvious that most of the town's income came from tourists visiting for the local trekking, archaeology, sandboarding, lagoons, and volcanoes. We stayed in San Pedro for a full two days while visiting local cultural sites, including salt flats, el Valle de la Luna, and villages even smaller than San Pedro with nothing but llamas and artisan shops. The most memorable experience, though, was the stargazing session that we held on the first night. All of the aspects that made San Pedro inconvenient during the day--high altitude, thin atmosphere, and lack of modern facilities--made it an amateur astronomer's paradise at night. In particular, the Milky Way, which looks like a pale whitish blob from even the clearest sites in the northern hemisphere, stood out like pure spilled milk on a pitch black piano. (Excuse me as I wax poetic.) It was quite possibly the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed.

Today, we visited two large radio telescopes: the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), both located in the middle of the hellishly dry desert that is northern Chile. It was cool to see the radio antennas just because they were so enormous, but it was even cooler to talk to the astronomers from all over the world who work there and spend their entire lives solving the mysteries of the cool (temperature-wise) universe. They almost made millimeter and centimeter astronomy sound exciting. Except for the whole altitude sickness at 5000 m part.

Anyway, if you've read this far, congratulations. The internet at this hotel is not permitting any image uploads, but I promise many pretty pictures with my next update. Bye bye!