Before dinner today, Jared, Laird, Alycia, and I visited the GMT site (thanks Dave!). I had been looking at GMT’s two weather towers in the distance from the LCO lodge since I arrived last week, so I’m glad the tour request went through. The site is still under construction, and it’s pretty much filled with rocks, construction equipment, two towers, and trailers.
As you readers may already know, “las campanas” translates to “the bells” in English. The reason for this is because the rocks here have a particular structure such that they make a bell-like sound when struck with a regular rock. The GMT site has many of these rocks present, even with the site cleared out. They did keep one rock for visitors to play with!
Giddy with glee, Alycia, Laird, and I went on complete exploration mode to find una campana de piedra. We managed to find small ones to keep. When we were leaving the main site, we stopped on the side for more exploring. Laird… well, Laird went all out and hauled a large stone.
Upon arrival back to LCO, Laird unloaded his new pet rock. He claims he’ll keep it by Jared’s hotel door and bang it in the mornings to wake Jared up. It makes me wonder if that’s a better sound to wake up to than the extremely noisy burros. Alycia claims that her campana de piedra will bless her with a night of excellent seeing.
I’ve been learning a lot these past 3 nights driving the AO. Katie, Laird, and Jared have been super patient with teaching and helping me through the whole task, even when I forget sequences and do the wrong thing. Shoutout to Alycia for her patience while I fumble around trying to reclose the loop and dealing with a ripped shell. However! Tonight looks super promising with clear skies, low wind, and seeing at one point dipped down to 0.6″!
Tonight has been going so well that I managed to get an awesome PSF on VisAO while driving the AO! (Michael, if you see this, can this get me an A in OPTI 528? kthx)
The winds were pretty insane yesterday that I was pretty amazed at how the ASM stayed in place. The idea alone for structural engineering astounds me. I have been listening to a lot of Broadway tunes while I have been working on the Fresnel propagation analysis for MagAO-X. So, after the howling winds of yesterday, this was the song that came to mind for me:
There wasn’t a quote yesterday, so I’ll include it now:
Jared: You can even choose the jewelry!
Today’s Quote:
Laird: The way these rocks work is like magic!
Dave: Yes but with science!
EDIT: Look who came back for a visit!
