Monday, May 30, 2016

An all-women observing run at Gemini

Hello Las Campanas Belles!  While I spend most of my time in Chile at LCO, this week I was in Chile observing on a telescope a couple hundred kilometers to the south: the Gemini South telescope at Cerro Pachon.  I blogged about it at Cosmic Diary/ Gemini Planet Imager, but I wanted to post a little about it here!

I had never been on an all-women observing run before, and neither had any of the 5 of us!  Myself, MagAO users Kate Follette, Kim Ward-Duong, and Jenny Patience, and student Sarah Blunt were at Gemini to look for planets using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI).  It's winter in Chile and we had some cloudy weather as well as a bit of snow, but we squeezed in observations whenever we could.  Check out the link above to read more about it!

And here is a picture of the women GPIES observers:




Here is the Gemini dome with some beautiful but not-good-for-observing clouds:


And they have some of the same animals at Gemini, like this cute little zorro near the dorms!