The moon as seen through the Mamalluca Observatory's telescope
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
We arrived in Vicuna after an overnight bus ride from Calama, in the north. After settling in to our very comfortable hostel, we walked to the Capel pisco distillery. Pisco is a grape liquor popular in South America, particularly Peru and Chile. We took a tour where we visited a grape smashing machine, storage tanks, the distillation tanks, the aging barrels, and the bottling and labeling area. After the tour, we got a single shot of flavored pisco to taste. We were pretty disappointed in the stinginess of the tasting “session”, but we bought a bottle of premade pisco sour, anyway.
In the evening we made dinner (pasta, I think) and met some of our hostel mates. Later, we visited the Mamalluca Observatory, several kilometers from Vicuna. At the observatory, we were able to view several celestial objects through a 30 cm telescope. A guide explained the background of each object as he dialed in the telescope position and rotated the roof. Here’s what we saw:
- M-42 – This is the middle object in Orion’s sword. It turns out this is actually a collection of stars.
- Seven Sisters (M-45) – A constellation of six visible stars; Subaru uses this constellation for their logo.
- Moons of Jupiter – Io, Europa, and Calisto were visible, Ganimedes was not.
- Tarantula Nebula – An object which is 180,000 light years away, resulting from the death of a star. It was incredible to think that the formation we were looking at occurs 180,000 years in the past.
- Star clusters – We viewed at two star clusters. The first had 10+ objects, the second had 100+ objects.
- Moon’s Surface – We were able to see incredible detail on the moon’s surface, including various craters and valleys.
After using the 30 cm telescope, we looked at the moon and several other stars with a smaller telescope outside the main observatory. With this telescope we were able to take photos of the moon using our point-and-shoot cameras.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
On Thursday, we headed to the village of Pisco Elqui. We went with a college-aged guy from New Jersey who we met at our hostel. From Pisco Elqui we walked to the village of XXX where we toured the Los Artesanos del Cochiguaz pisco distillery. This is a small craft distillery that specializes in flavored piscos. They were slightly more generous with the tastings than Capel was. In XXX we viewed the grave of Gabriela Mistral, one of Chile’s Nobel laureates for poetry. On the walk back from the memorial we ran into a huge, pony-sized Saint Bernard.
Back in Vicuna we did some grocery shopping. We stopped to do “internet” on the way home. In the evening we cooked dinner (more pasta).
