Saturday, May 30, 2015

The Real Bells

We thought hard about the title for this blog before going for the pun "Las Campanas Belles." But the pun isn't necessarily obvious, I realize. Here is the audio pun in the form of a movie that I made this evening, just before dinner:
Those rocks are where Las Campanas, i.e. The Bells, gets its name. They're so neat that I spent an afternoon (in Chilean summer, when there was time for such things), banging every rock I saw along a walk to try to find one to take home. No luck, though the staff told me that they're common up here. I'll let Jackie Faherty, another Belle up here this week, post her narrated video later.

My schedule this week is not including long walks: sleep, yoga, shower, eat, watch sunset, observe, repeat. And today I didn't even fit in the yoga or a walk amidst the rocks. We had a great, long night last night with 12 hours of work.

Now we have three Carnegie women on the mountain! Jackie Faherty, a Hubble Fellow at my department (DTM) is on the Magellan Baade Telescope looking at brown dwarfs. I'm on the Magellan Clay Telescope looking at young stars and circumstellar disks, and Jessica Donaldson, a postdoc at DTM arrived today. She'll be observing for our program on the duPont Telescope, and I'll have to let her write her own entry about her first trip to Las Campanas.

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