*An occultation is where a solar system object passes directly in front of a background star. The object should block out all of the star light; however, if the object has an atmosphere, the starlight will be bent by the atmosphere and directed towards the observer. By studying the light that was diffracted through the atmosphere, you can discover characteristics about the atmosphere.
Last summer I was given the opportunity to travel to Chile, to use one of the Magellan telescopes (http://www.lco.cl/telescopes-information/magellan/) to view a Pluto occultation. I had never been anywhere in South America before, so naturally I jumped on the opportunity for adventure. There were two occultations scheduled within a week of each other, so the plan was to view both occultations from Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
As a sense of scale, the plane flight down to Chile lasted nearly 15 hours, split across two flights. Each occultation event was predicted to last about three minutes. You could fit 18,000 occultations into the time span of a one-way trip to Chile. I must have had 18,000 occultations worth of excitement since I was awake for the entire flight.
Anyway, enough talk. Here is a photo summary of the trip. Apologies for the quality of the pictures, this trip was documented with a small point-and-shoot camera. The New Zealand trip will be documented with a nice camera that I am borrowing from the department!
First view of the observatory! This is the view of the telescopes from the lodge; the Magellan telescopes are located on the right, the Irene duPont and Swope are on the left.
Sunset at the observatory!!
Close up of the Magellan telescope. I was observing on the telescope on the left - the Clay telescope.
Here I am after setting up the camera! The Clay telescope is 6.5 meters in diameter.
View of the lodging from the Magellan telescope peak.
Here I am in front of all of the telescopes! This is my absolute favorite picture.
The sunsets were gorgeous. The problem with this is that gorgeous sunsets are typically caused by clouds. The majority of our days in Chile were cloudy :(
This was the first occultation night! There was little hope from the very beginning.
This was the second occultation night! It was the night of my 20th birthday, and I was wishing for nothing more than a clear occultation. For the longest time the clouds were patchy, but were not over the important area of the sky. However, two minutes before the occultation began, the clouds covered Pluto and Charon.
Here I am with the duPont telescope.
The Magellan telescopes are stunning.
I visited a solar telescope up on the mountain also.
This solar telescope was much smaller than the others.
I had some free days between the two occultations so I did a lot of exploring by myself during the daytime while the other astronomers were all sleeping. Without a tripod I had a terribly difficult time successfully including myself in any images.
Overall, this trip was a wonderful learning experience and I had a lot of fun observing. I hope that the New Zealand trip has clear skies :)
No comments:
Post a Comment