Starting an Observing Run at CTIO

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 01:30 PM by Administrator

After 27 hours of flights and waits at airports, I have finally made it to La Serena, Chile. I stay at the AURA compound there tonight and I’ll probably walk around the city this afternoon. Tomorrow, we take the “carryall” to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (a.k.a. CTIO) to start our 6 night observing run at the Yale 1-meter telescope. We will be taking deep images of 1 degree fields to the west of the Galactic Center, looking to compare the number of stars of various types seen in these fields with those on the other side of the Galactic center. We already know we see an excess of stars on the “eastern” side of the Galactic Center relative to the west. This excess means there are more stars about 6000 light years from us on the “east” side versus the “west”. Why, that’s the question we are trying to resolve. More on our progress (not results, so much as status reports on our observing) as the run progresses and I figure out how to post remotely to the blog.

Posted in Astronomy News

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