12 April 2010

back at the telescope again....

since the whole reason for our antipodal adventure was my taking a job working at the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), i am way overdue on writing a blog post about it. SALT itself is located at the SAAO site in Sutherland which is about 350 km from cape town and takes a bit under 4 hours to drive.


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the drive to sutherland is pretty spectacular. you pass through the winelands between stellenbosch and paarl, go through the impressive du toits kloof pass and a 4 km long tunnel, pass through the winelands of the breede and hex river valleys, and the pop up onto the high desert of the karoo. the place with the covered parking mentioned in the previous post is in touws rivier and is the designated stop-over point for all SAAO transport going to/from sutherland (we have a fuel account there).

the hostel at the SAAO site gets some pretty killer sunsets when it's clear. it's below the ridge where the telescopes are and also has a good view of SALT. the observatory also has a resident herd of springbok that do a good job of keeping the surrounding veld nicely manicured. there are also a lot of dassies lurking around the site and verreaux's black eagles that keep the dassie population in check. the aerial combat that the eagles sometimes perform in the evening is pretty fun to watch, though hard to capture photographically.