La Silla

We went north after leaving Viña del Mar and headed to the city of La Serena. There are a couple of things that I wanted to do while up north (it's actually not that north, but from a Santiago-centric perspective it's north) and one of them was to visit observatories. The first one we went to was supposed to be a 2 hour drive from our hotel. It turned out to be a slow winding road. It was also very foggy and the 2 hour drive quickly became a 3 hour drive.
With the amount of fog and cloud cover I was very worried as to the visibility of stars. As we kept driving and climbed the mountain range, it seemed as though there was an invisible line where all clouds were no longer allowed to be and once we crossed that line, it was blue skies ahead!
After about 2.5 hours we finally could see the observatory - at the peak of one of the smaller mountains. The drive up was a sequence of switch backs and it seemed as though we driving to Mars. It was very cool.
The observatory was at an altitude of 2400 meters. I had a bit of tightness in my head, I thought it might be some altitude sickness. I experimented a little bit by exerting myself physically, taking stairs two at a time, holding my breath while walking, clenching my leg muscles while taking the tour, etc. I had no clear scientific evidence that I could control the sickness.
In any case, the telescopes were huge with 8m radius mirrors. The telescopes are there as a part of some European astronomy consortium and this place in Chile was chosen because of the number of cloudless days and lack of light pollution. I was hoping the tour was going to be given by Gunter or Sven, the euro scientist with an awesome accent but instead it was Maria and Juan. Maria would give us the English tour and she would speak for 2 minutes. Juan talked for 15 in Spanish. Lori asked me what the difference was and I couldn't really say. They said the same things, just a bit different.
I wondered what it would be like to work there. Sleeping during the day, working at night, under the natural lights. Isolated with a select few people and a bunch of computers. I think astronomy is cool but I don't think it's that cool. Geophysics sounds pretty good to me in that respect.