 Made it off the mountain, back down in La Serena. The sun is setting, it's beautiful out, it's clear night. Hopefully gonna go take some cool photos of the stars tonight. Takeaways from the trip. The telescope is so big. This is the first time I've gotten to see a truly large telescope. I worked at a three and a half meter telescope, which is big. I mean, that's like a telescope the size of a house. This is much bigger. With an 8.4 meter diameter, a primary mirror, this puts Rubin Observatory and the Simone Survey Telescope in the like top 10 biggest telescopes we've ever made out of glass. This is a truly impressive instrument. You get this impression that everything at the observatory is bespoke. It's built for this one thing. And it is, right? Like the whole thing is built for this telescope, for this survey, for this program. Everything, every design choice from the style of metal, why some metal is perforated while some metal is solid, how the door is open and the big louvers in the enclosure, how the enclosure moves, everything designed and thoughtfully built to facilitate and maximize the science. You have to have motors that drive the telescope and different motors that drive the dome and they have to be able to work together and you have to make choices about how you buy those parts to maximize the science. Everything built, software, hardware, engineering, structural engineering, all of it working together. It's really cool to see. Also, because it's a very purpose-built facility, they have some pretty good branding. The telescope itself is really iconic. It has this incredibly short design. It has this big round secondary structure. Like it's very beautiful from a telescope engineering standpoint. I love the subtle baffling. I love the way the secondary mirror supports work in the way in from the support truss around them. Everything looks very beautiful and very thoughtful and very functional and yet still beautiful. The building itself has this iconic profile with that rigid, brutal-looking dome structure and then this sweeping back end where the support building and the operations building is. Like it has this really iconic profile which is very much unlike the other telescopes up on the mountain with these big sort of round domes. They're all beautiful, all the telescopes. They're all beautiful telescopes. But Reuben is very unique. They also have this beautiful color of blue. This color of blue. This is my scarf that I was wearing. It was sold by StarTorialist and it's this beautiful scarf which has the Reuben telescope design printed on it. It's wonderful, it's soft. It was just the right thing on the windy, chilly mountaintop. But I love how iconic that design is and how you immediately know which telescope this is. There's no guess. Even me, a professional astronomer, I go up and I haven't observed on any of these telescopes so I can't remember which one is Sierra Tololo and which one is Gemini and which one is SOAR. Like I had to ask somebody which telescope is which because I couldn't remember. They're all beautiful telescopes. I just am not as familiar. But this telescope I'm very familiar with. The blue is also used throughout. Any surface that needed to be powder coated or anodized is basically this color of blue except for the surfaces that are black like the light baffling and the surfaces you want to be non-reflective and absorbent of light so you don't get like scattered light glinting in the telescope. Then you use black. I mean, not sweatshirt black but black. But like the handrails and the doorknobs and the trim, the little accents and things on the dome. Like everything has this beautiful color of blue. This is gonna be the color of blue that drives modern astronomy for the next decade. They also had the design of the telescope on like the sort of frosted glass style like as decals on a bunch of the windows and the doors. I thought that was beautiful. Like that was very neat. A really cool way to sort of integrate the aesthetic of the telescope into the design of the space for people. And so mark my words. That's what we should do back in Seattle. We have these nice windows in our offices, these nice sort of like wide window panes and we should have the telescope design printed into a nice beautiful decal that we can stick on the window. But that's my homework is to find out how to get that vector graphics that I can make those decals. Stay tuned for that. I got my start in astronomy doing engineering assistance work. Like I was sanding down metal to apply gauges. I was helping assemble a spectrograph and test out fiber optics. And then after college, I went to actually work at a telescope for a while. This is the Apache point three and a half meter, which I've since then used a lot as a scientist. And so I've seen both a little bit of the engineering, a bunch of the operations and a lot of the science operations, right? The scientist modes. I've sort of seen the observatory and sort of these three different modes. I'm not unique in this. Lots of astronomers have had these sort of hands on experiences as well. But it gives me a really good appreciation of this telescope. And so while the telescope felt special and monumental and fascinating, I was also really struck by like how familiar it was. Like it smelled like an observatory. It also smelled like a machine shop where people were welding because that's what was going on. But like it smelled and it felt like an observatory. The way that the dome, the shape of the dome motors just felt very familiar, just larger. Like a telescope that I have kind of always understood how it works. And it just, it's just sort of scaled up. That's cool because there's a sense of like belonging, right? Because astronomy is a discipline made up of people. And my experience has been one of both hardware and place and also the software and the science. And so getting to see that hardware I think is important for me. It's very gratifying in my journey as somebody who spent a long time thinking about this observatory. It's also really important for astronomers to understand how the light comes in, how it's collected and yes, of course the software and the choices that are made. We draw diagrams for students. Like this is what the light path looks like. It bounces off the primary mirror into the secondary mirror, down into the cool tertiary mirror, the sort of M1, M3 mirror, and then up into the camera. And then it's like this camera. It focuses it onto a chip or a bunch of chips and makes an image. And then the software takes over and it does a bunch of like fancy and rapid things, dot, dot, dot, then you get your picture and you get your database. And then you do your science. But every step in that chain from how the dome funnels wind and how the mirror is cooled and what choices were made about the baffling and the reflections path and then all the choices that are made in the software, how are the images read out? How quickly are they read? How do you reference them and calibrate them back to catalog level images? All those choices, all those many engineering and software engineering and just people choices affect what is really out there compared to what you see in your data and the science you can do. And when you're trying to tease out the very subtle, very small changes in the universe or very small signals in the universe, you need to understand every link in that chain. And I think it's really important. Not just as an educator who wants to teach. I think it's really important for scientists who are gonna make amazing discoveries with AI and with enormous data sets that we understand every link in that chain from how the observatory was built to how it operates, to how the software operates, to how the catalogs that you end up doing your machine learning on, how they're built. You have to at least at some level understand that entire chain so that the thing you measure, you can assign meaning to. I would love for every student to come up and get to tour an observatory like this. So we finished the telescope tour. We got to go over to the auxiliary telescope, which is a calibration telescope that sits sort of across the parking lot and up another hill. That's where actually the best view of the telescope comes from. You get these great sort of shots. And then we went down and got a little bit of lunch at the LST veer room observatory canteen in cafeteria. It's just a little dining room and a little building. But it's nice to not have to drive down the mountain 20 or 50 kilometers to go get a sandwich. Instead they've actually got food, hot food be made up there. Again, there was 20 people working there with hard hats. Like this was an active construction zone. It was really cool. And then we drove down the mountain and we enjoyed the sights. I love a good desert. It feels like telescope country. It feels right. It feels like a place where you can do this kind of science. We drove down the mountain through the desert back into La Serena. La Serena is a lovely, very busy, very vibrant town. There's a bunch of really cool art and murals and like political art and interesting graffiti. It's a very colorful and interesting city. I really liked the nerdy art. Certainly that like culture of nerddom and science has definitely permeated some of the art here in La Serena. I saw several galaxies, at least one millennium falcon and one Yoda. So that was pretty cool. And then we had some dinner and now here I am exhausted, checked into my flight and gonna be ready to go home in the morning. So for now I'm gonna go out. It looks like it's gonna be pretty clear. I've seen the telescope. I've gotten to talk with a bunch of fascinating people. I've gotten to meet some of the people on the ribbon team who have never gotten to meet because they live down here. And the last thing I really wanna see is the large and small Magellanic clouds. Now these are the satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. They're small galaxies, like 10 times smaller than the Milky Way but they're orbiting and actually sort of colliding with the Milky Way. I got to teach about them in my galactic astronomy class last year and I've never gotten to see them. I've never been in the Southern Hemisphere before and so to hopefully get to see them. So it looks clear. I don't know exactly what time they rise and so I can see them but I'm gonna take the camera out and we'll just see what we can see. We'll have some fun. If I can get a few cool pictures, I'll put them in here. If I can get a few pictures with some cool stars that would be a really good icing on the cake. And then I promise I'm going to bed and I'm going home. This has been the culmination of years of work getting to come down with part of our team, getting to meet the people here, getting to actually visit the summit and see the big glass for myself. It's one of those things that makes you excited to go home, sleep and then get back to work. It's gonna be a really amazing decade in astronomy. Two years from now, this observatory is gonna be online. You're gonna have real-time alerts coming out, discovering things from asteroids to weird stars to supernovae. We're gonna be seeing things that nobody has ever seen before. And now I've gotten to touch it, to see where it comes from and now it just makes it a little more human, a little more personal. It's gonna be an exciting decade in astronomy. Keep looking up.