Paranal

I work at the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. It's about 75 or 80 miles south of a little city called Antofagasta; it's in the middle of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. The observatory was built here because it's really far away from any sources of light pollution, and also because the atmospheric conditions here make for the best observing on earth. The downside to the remote location, of course, is that I'm up here for eight days at a time. But then I get six days off in Santiago with Kipley and our soon-to-be baby. The observatory is pretty amazing. We have a total of 10 telescopes at Paranal. There are four big telescopes called Unit Telecopes (UTs), four smaller mobile ones called Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs), and two other telescopes (VST and VISTA) that are used for making wide field of view surveys of the sky. The interesting thing about the UTs and the ATs is that they can be used together in ways that effectively make it like there's one gigantic telescope with a main mirror as big as the distance between the most distant telescopes. When they're used like that, they system is called the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, or VLTI. So anyway, the picture shows two of the UTs open at sunset, with a couple of the smaller ATs to the left.



The ATs look pretty small in that picture, but here's another picture that gives you an idea of how big they really are. That's me with the hard hat on learning how to move the telescope.