Day 17 of 68 — Tour of an Observatory

January 20, 2018 Paul Groves

Today we visited the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. It is located atop a mountain where there are usually 300 days of clear weather per year and the air is super clean. It is owned and operated by a consortium of US and South American colleges/universities. We toured the facilities and treated us by opening and closing the observatory doors and rotated the telescope like they would if they were actually viewing the night sky. What fun!

Later traveled to the small Town of Vicuña for lunch. The Nobel winning poet Gabriela Mistral is from there. Her face in cement is at the bottom of a fountain there facing the mountains around the town that she loved.

We then returned to the ship.