Author: Joseph Long

MagAO-X is here on the mountain, and we have been working to unpack it since its arrival at 10am. As such, anyone looking for coherent prose in what follows is warned to expect disappointment.

We got pics tho.

Unpacking is dirty work, but it’s all worth it.

Our hands look like this:

So his hands can look like this:

Today was very “astronomy with hard hats”

But also “astronomy with cleanroom gowns”

There were occasional meetings of the two, even:

“Maggie” unpacked his new grating for VIS-X:

It was shiny:

The P.I. hugged his electronics rack once again:

MagAO-X let it all hang out:

The success of MagAO-X quite literally rests on students:

There was also a small earthquake, but it’s all good.

Song of the Day

We had 1975, now we got 1977. Ana Tijoux is a Chilean-French MC I used to listen to long before I ever visited Chile.

Trying to rap along with that is challenge mode for maintaining your Spanish-speaking skills. (I used to be able to…)

As a bonus, here’s her 2020 protest song that taught me “guanaco” is slang for the water cannon police use to disperse protests in Chile (because they both spit at you, get it?)

The truckers are politely “only” causing traffic jams rather than a full blockade, but if you depend on freight vehicles for your business—or telescope operations—you’re still hamstrung by the fact that a ton of the trucks in Chile are busy blocking roadways and not shipping goods.

The government has read them the riot act and started detaining people. Negotiations continued today with some initial promising statements from the truckers. They continued until quite a late hour this Saturday only to remain stuck on the trucker union’s demand for government price controls on fuel. So it sounds like Sunday will remain truckless, and instrumentless.

On the plus side, we do not have thousands of tons of fruit in danger of rotting, or salmon that needs to be shipped immediately. We just sit in our rooms, screwing around doing important science stuff on laptops, and popping over to the lodge for our three square meals a day. It’d be quite relaxing, if it weren’t for the looming threat of losing telescope time worth roughly $50k a night—and the super intense compressed schedule to get on sky ASAP when the instrument gets here.

I don’t believe I used a blog post to announce our official patch design for 2022B, but now’s as good a time as any.

This is Gabriela the gata Andina (Andean mountain cat). The patch vendor did a great job simplifying my artwork, as always, but gave the cat a bit of a suspicious look.

In light of current events, I would like to present my online-exclusive patch design:

The sunsets here on the mountain are incredible. Arizona can do some great stuff with monsoon clouds, but there’s this difficult-to-capture lilac band across the cloudless sky at sunset here that is beyond compare.

Some people only have eyes for one thing, though.

Also, I met a cool lizard but I didn’t catch their name. Anyone know them?

Aside from that, not much to report. Eden, Avalon, and Jialin arrive tomorrow, so we’ll have some more bloggers. (And, when the instrument shows up, hands. But who can say when that will be?)

Song of the Day

The connection to yesterday’s Delirium by The Dead South is… Saskatchewan!

Yep, more Canadians cosplaying my Southern roots. I like the song, though.

Now, if you want to hear some non-imaginary Appalachia, check out this short video Warren found explaining how to tell when you’ve got good alky-haul.

Well, @warrenbfoster still owes us vacation photos from Valparaiso, but who knows what his internet situation is. Someone’s still gotta write the Day 0 blog post, though.

Compared to last time this trip didn’t have many surprises. We did learn several things, though:

• When there’s a choice of LATAM and Delta for the 10-hour flight, Delta’s got the better seats. Jared reports leg-room upgrades on LATAM are barely anything, and not worth the additional cost. I had to sit on my complimentary blanket to sleep because the hard seats were tough on one’s rear after a few hours.
• COVID-related arrival measures are entirely gone. No test on entry, no verification of vaccine documents. The Ministerio de Salud has dispensed with mask-wearing requirements indoors (except for healthcare settings) and most employees and passengers opted to go bare-faced.
• Passport control took a while, but kept moving. Single line for nationals and foreigners.
• Customs enforcement seems to be up. The scannable tags system that was new last time is now gone, replaced with brief interviews with Jared and myself about equipment we were carrying. We aren’t importing anything (of course) so we explained we had tools for scientific research and they let us go.
• They no longer seem to care about the purpose or destination of visits. I have a slip saying I’m visiting Santiago for vacation that I must present on exiting the country, but I was never asked for those details.
• As always, the “collect your bag, complete customs, re-check your bag” dance is a pain. Unhappily we must report that LATAM domestic baggage recheck is now even sillier. There is a counter in the international terminal, down the hall with the taxi stands right after customs but before you actually exit. It was super backed up and after waiting 10 minutes not one person had successfully re-checked their bag and left. If it’s not busy, it might be better than the situation across the road. We schlepped our bags across the way to the old terminal (T1) and went to a place with approximately 4 actual agents and all self-service kiosks. Of course, the self-service bag check does not work with our pre-tagged bags so you can go straight to the “I need an actual human” line.

Song of the Day

Okay, so the song’s about a violent break-up but… we are preparada for 2022B.

Someone should probably come up with Song of the Day rules.