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On September of 2023 I was able to visit Chile for observing... haha, not exactly 😶. I went to renovate my VISA aaaaand I observed 😁.
Chile hosts a large number of ground-based telescopes (depending on the metrics, some people have claim we will have in our territory more than 60%!) and I was lucky that a few weeks before there was a call to support observing (either in person or remote) for the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey 2 (DECaLS-2) in Cerro Tololo International Observatory (CTIO).
This is the 4 m Víctor M. Blanco Telescope, it is identical to the Mayall 4m telescope located on Kitt Peak. It has the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the camera used in the Dark Energy Survey.
But... why did I observed in first place? Well, I am part of a collaboration called DESI (Dark Energy Science Instrument) that is collecting one order of magnitude more spectroscopic samples of galaxies than previous collaborations. But for getting the spectra (full composition of the light) you first use a photometric sample to know where to sample. The photometric data I was helping to collect will hopefully be used in DESI 2. But let's go back to observing:
You are suggested to first arrive a night earlier to acclimate of working during the night. I went to study the different screens and control room of the Blanco telescope. I was unlike that during my visit there was no internet.
In the bottom images we have the climate parameters, including wind, temperature, humidity... There are also the filters, the dome flat images and the status of the test images. I met the telescope operators!
This is how it looked outside (yep, had a bunch of clouds :/)
Okey, ready for my first night!
First night of observation
Soooo many things went wrong! We had a lot of clouds and couldn't open until 1:40 am (the night was long due to Winter in the South Hemisphere), and still the humidity was high. The telescope couldn't focus: (see the ring shape?)
Okey, we finally focus (it was the low temperature in addition to the high humidity). Then I run a magic string on the terminal, and vualá, my first pictures with DECam! (I look cold!)
I continued observing, checking the seeing, humidity and sky time to time (I identified Scorpion!). I learn a bit of how to see the night sky (usually cosmologists we are bad at identifying constellations hehe), how to use reference stars and play with the images I was generating.
A lot of clouds appear at 6:30 am, and I was falling sleep, so we decided to close the telescope. Did my report and went to sleep :)
Second night of observation
I went a bit earlier this day to try to see a vizcacha and failed. The sunset was beautiful, with a bit of clouds though, which delayed again the aperture eof the telescope. We monitored the sky using Rasicam, and as you can see, there where a lot of clouds. We open and observed from 12:15-6:30 am. The tree rings of the CCDs are visible too when playing with the images I took.
It was a great experience and hope to repeat it in the near future!
As mentioned in my bio, I like practicing analog photography in my free time. Go and check some of the pictures I took with my Minolta X-700. I used a Kodak Gold 200 in 35 mm, develop it at Photoworks and digitalize it myself.
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