Just over a week ago I was lucky enough to have gone to Chile, and got to use one of the massive VLT telescopes! I was there for four nights as a visiting astronomer to use X-Shooter, a huge spectrograph observing all the way from the near infra-red, optical to the ultraviolet. The program to be observed was quite diverse, ranging from supernova, compact binaries, and even an exoplanet! (My first one...:D) Unfortunately the weather was not great. I learned that even on the driest desert on earth you do sometimes see black ugly clouds. I did loose observing time because of this (and had pointing restrictions some other times as well), but the most astonishing thing is that for a very short while on my last night it rained! This was only recorded at base camp (a few hundred meters below the VLT, and only for a few minutes), but still quite extraordinary given the fact that I was in the Atacama desert! Oh well, that is what you get when you do observational astrophysics: massive weather induced frustration! I've nearly learned to get used to it! Nevertheless, I did get some good and usefull data.
Today I just arrived on the beautiful island of La Palma in the Canary islands to begin a 10 day (!!!) observing run using the INT. This is part of an ongoing program to observe the Galactic plane in various broad and narrow photometric bands. Moreover in this run I will begin the Kepler field survey to essentially perform the same observations in the Kepler field. This is cool! :D and I can't wait to get my hands on the actual data and see what sweet objects are lurking in there waiting for Kepler to obtain spectacular light curves of them. Anyhow, for tonight I am "free" and will treat myself with a nice dinner and probably some wine, given that I will have to suffer the observatory food for the next 10 days!
Ciao!
Simo
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