| We visited
Chile primarily for the ADASS computing in astronomy
conference, being held in Santiago from 22-26 Oct,
2017. Several LSST telescope colleagues were also
attending and arranged a visit prior to ADASS to the
LSST construction site on Cerro Pachon, near La Serena.
While there we visited two other telescopes: Gemini,
also on Cerro Pachon, and DECam on Cerro Tololo. All
were in sight of each other. Deb played tourist in Santiago while I attended the meetings. We stayed for a long weekend afterwards, taking a bus to Valparaiso, on the coast, for a day, and a day trip into the Andes to kayak, at Laguna del Inca, at 9500' - our new kayak altitude record. And a condor sighting. We took "Free Walking Tour" 3-4 hr guided walks in Valparaiso and Santiago (Deb did two in Santiago so I could do one), and we had a guide for our kayak outing. We learned a lot from the guides about life in Chile, and perceptions of recent history in Chile. LSST folks you'll see are: Brian Van Klaveren, Kenny Lo, J Matt Peterson, Gregory Dubois-Felsmann, Ranpal Gill, Wil O'Mullane, Robert Lupton, Xiuqin Wu, and Tim Jenness. Valparaiso is a colourful, hilly town, known for its street art. San Francisco's Mission District has real competition there! Santiago is in a lovely location, almost surrounded by tall mountains. Urban planning seems to have been absent, and air quality is an issue. This part of Chile is very reminiscent of California. And the latitude is about the same (we noticed such similarities also in Melbourne, Australia). We had an adventure getting local sim cards for our travel phones - we got them in La Serena, but noticed when we left there, the phones stopped working. Turns out foreign phones must be registered, as of Sept 23. We did a merry chase (with a lot of Google Translate) to figure out how to register them and did so the 2nd day in Santiago. Two days after we got home, we got emails saying our phones were now registered and would be working in a few hours... |
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