Vicuna

Friday, April 25 – Day 129

Took an overnight bus to La Serena, which is about 400 km north of Valparaiso. It’s a coastal city of about 125,000 people, and is the second oldest city in Chile. From there, I rented a car and drove 50 km inland to a small town called Vicuna.

Vicuna has a population of about 3,000, and is popular for only two reasons; first, Gabriela Mistral is from here – she’s another Nobel Prize winning poet (1936), and second, the cluster of observatories on top of Cerro Tololo. This is the southern end of the Atacama Desert, which has some of the darkest skies in the world. Most of the world’s leading astronomy organizations have facilities and equipment here.

As city lights began to affect the performance of the telescopes, the scientist worked with the city to convert all the outdoor lights to sodium vapor bulbs because the wavelength of sodium doesn’t interfere as much with the starlight. The sodium bulbs actually produce more light that mercury vapor bulbs and cost less to operate, but they are more expensive. For the city’s cooperation, the scientists built a public observatory for the city and gave them some pretty cool equipment.

The city offers guided tours for $5,000 pesos, so I went up this evening and had a look. We got to view a few planets through their 12 inch Schmitt-Cassiagrain (2.5x larger mirror than my telescope, but 15x more expensive), and then looked at some cool stars through a 14 inch Dobsonian. There were a few too many people on the tour for my taste, and we only got to see 5 or 6 objects over the course of an hour and a half, but just being out under the stars was worth it. I still learned a lot and got to see some Southern Hemisphere stuff that we never get to see from the North.

About a month ago, I got on a list for a day-time tour the namesake Cerro Tololo telescope, which has a primary mirror of 4 meters. It was one of the largest in the world when it was built in 1960’s, and the telescope’s mount alone weighs 50 tons. The tour starts tomorrow at 9:15am, and the front gate to the mountain is about 20 km away. Despite my best intentions to go to bed early, I found myself in a local dance hall at 3:15 am. I really hate it when that happens.