La Silla Observatory, Chilie by James Clarke

James Clarke, a past student member of Farnham Astronomical Society went on to study for his PhD.  He sent us some wonderful photos of his visit to La Silla Observatory, Chilie where he was acquiring data for his research.

My Chile trip was to observe some of my Brown dwarf candidates for two nights so that I could obtain radial velocities for them, therefore determining their space motion. After flying into Santiago I stayed a night at the ESO guest house, watching the rain and hoping it would pass!

The second day was spent travelling 400km north to La Serena and then up the mountain in preparation for observing. I used the Fiber fed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph (FEROS) on the 2.2m telescope to observe my objects (The telescope in the pictures is the 1.5m ESO telescope which FEROS used to be based on). There were mixed conditions, which meant unfortunately there was only one nights observing out of two, but I managed to get decent data for about 7 out of 12 candidates.

The last picture shows a desert fox female and its cub. They are extremely tame and  hang around the control room up the mountain – mainly because the  astronomers feed them scraps! After receiving the data (~10GB worth) 
I set off back to the UK to get analysing!