Cerro Armazones Day 1
Cerro Armazones Day 1
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
I’ve headed here to the Atacama Desert in Chile to work on a small telescope here which is part of the VYSOS project. I’m at Cerro Armazones which is the southern candidate site for the Thirty Meter Telescope. In the map below, I’ve marked the “lower camp” where I stayed. Cerro Armazones is the peak just to the northeast of the camp and Cerro Murphy which is where our small telescope is loacted is due west of the camp. The road up Cerro Armazones and the TMT site testing equipment at the summit is visible in the satellite image, however, Cerro Murphy is new enough that the road and telescopes do not show up in the satellite image. The European Southern Observatory built the VLT just 15 or 20 kilometers to the west of Armazones.
I arrived in Antofagasta, a large (300,000 population) port city, in the afternoon and took a taxi to the Universidad Catolica del Norte (who operate Cerro Murphy) and met up with our collaborators and immediately headed up the mountain. We got there just after sunset.