Trip to Chile - day 0

I’m writing this post from the ESO guest house in Santiago, Chile, after a loooong flight over the Atlantic. Later this afternoon I will take a plane to Antofagasta, and then a bus to the Paranal observatory. We are here for the commissioning of ESPRESSO, the new high-resolution spectrograph installed in ESO’s VLT.

I had been to Chile before, to observe with HARPS in La Silla. But I have no idea what it will be like to observe during the commissioning of a new instrument, and I have never been to ESO’s largest observatory, Paranal.

The goal is to document the journey in this series of posts. Stay tuned!