Last Post

Well my flight out of Santiago, Chile has been delayed for a couple hours so I've used the time to put together the last post for this blog.

I'd like to thank you for following along, while Malargue in many ways isn't as exciting as Antarctica, I've enjoyed my time here and I hope you found some enjoyment in the blog.

Our installation was a success, had we more time we would have done more things and perhaps done some things differently, but we're taking data which is what counts. If the science works out, there will be many more trips to Argentina in the years to come as it's possible they would install dozens of setups similar to the one we put in. I should know how that all goes in a few months.

I forgot to share some photos of Malargue. In this photo you can see the hotel that I stayed at, the Rio Grande, as well as a line of cars waiting to getting compressed natural gas from the gas station. A line forms each morning waiting for the tanker to make a delivery because the station sells out everyday. I've seen people just leave their cars there for hours just to save their place in line. There isn't really a line for the diesel or gasoline, but we did find two gas stations in Mendoza that were out of gasoline.














Here you can see one of the many gomerias in Malargue and the surrounding country. These tire shops are open 24/7 and look like the fly by night operations, but apparently are quite reasonably priced and useful given the road conditions.















Here's what a stretch of road looks like going out to Coihueco.















Here you can see Cerro Sosneado from Coihueco. Sosneado is 17,000 feet tall, however 5000 feet of it are included in the land that I am standing on. At 17,000 feet it is about half a mile taller than Mount Whitney.














This shot is again from Coihueco and you can see Cerro Sosneado. I believe the pass to the left of Sosneado is the pass that the Uruguayan flight took carrying the rugby players that crashed into the Andes in 1972. It's a pretty amazing story, but the survivors ended up resorting to cannibalism but 1/3 of the people involved were eventually rescued when a group of the survivors went looking for help. It's been remade into a few films, but Alive is one of the better films on the story.














Sunset at Coihueco.















If you look along the top of the fence on the very left of the photo you may be able to see Los Leones, the other site that I went to. (Don't look too hard, I've zoomed in a bit in the next photo).















My guess is you probably can't see it, so here it is zoomed in a bit. If you look carefully in the middle of the photo, you'll see a few white dots, I believe those are the buildings at Los Leones.














The last couple days at Coihueco we were spoiled by the support crew as they prepared two amazing lunches for us. Definitely the best food I've had since I've been here, though the food in general has been pretty good.














We were checking out our system by looking at the passage of the sun across our feed. Here you can see the reflection of the sun off of our dish on the face of our feed.















Here's a shot of us determining where exactly the dish is pointing using a theodolite.















A shot of the final setup. The inside of the electronics hut in the background is in the next photo.





























































A shot of the highest mountain in the Americas, the Southern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, and/or outside of the Himalayas. It is also the tallest non-technical mountain in the world meaning you can walk up it with an oxygen bottle without ropes or axes.
















A view of Aconcagua just below the wingtip from the flight from Mendoza to Santiago. At about 22,000 feet tall, it's over a mile shorter than Everest.

Malargue

I'm approaching the end of my trip to Argentina. Tomorrow I have a 5 hour drive back to Mendoza and then start the journey back to Hawaii.

While I've been here, I've learned that Malargue is a town that has its roots in mining and farming but has developed into more of a touristy place. It is about an hour's drive from Las Lenas, the largest ski area in Argentina. The town also tries to promote other outdoor activities here such as hiking, spelunking, horseback riding, wildlife watching... From the people I've spoken to, it's sounds like over the years the town has become more and more focused on tourism, which drives up the prices in the town but it also means there are more places to eat than I would expect for a town this size.


I've noticed that Malargue has a number of stray dogs running around the town. I also noticed that a lot of houses and businesses here use elevated baskets to store their trash. It took me a little bit to put the two together and realize that they used the baskets to keep the dogs from going through their trash. I've heard that there are some notorious dogs around the Observatory, but nobody on this trip has been bitten.















Apparently we also need to keep an eye out for dancing businessmen in the street, but I haven't seen any.















Malargue also has a clock tower in the middle of town which lights up at night. It's somewhat awkwardly placed in the middle of the intersection but it lights up at night and is a good point of reference.

Castillo de Pinchera

Today we went on a hike because we ran out of things to do until the workers get back to work tomorrow. We were going to go on a hike in Castillo de Pinchera, which is about a 30 minute drive from the observatory building, but when we got there we found out that it was closed.

This is a view of what I believe to be Castillo de Pinchera. I think the hike gets you up on the hill, but I don't really know. They have campgrounds and grills near the parking lot, so I imagine it's a more popular destination in the Spring and Summer.















We ended up continuing on the dirt road for a ways. Along the way we saw cattle, sheep, goats, and horses.















I believe this is the rancher's house.
















This is a pretty terrible shot, but on the very left of the image you can see a fox carcass that the ranchers likely hung on the fence. I missed getting an excellent shot of a gaucho on horseback with his dogs, but I'm hoping I will come across some again.
















We ended up hiking up the ridge in the middle of the photo. It was about a 1000 foot elevation gain.
















Up the river about 100 feet was a horse carcass as well as a shoe and a gaucho hat.















Your standard lichen photo.















The view from the top. On the left you can see a gypsum quarry on the side of the mountain.















The UH contingent.

Pierre Auger

Here is the photo of one of the tanks that I posted earlier. Each tank contains about 3000 gallons of deionized water that is used as the detector medium. The tanks are solar powered with a battery backup and relay the information via radio.




















Inside the tank is a liner, larger than this model.




















You can see the three white circles on the top of the liner. The dome on top is an actual dome that goes in each of those three white circles. The dome protects the photomultiplier tube (PMT) pictured below. PMTs detect flashes of light and each tank has three of them.
















This is a map of the array. Each dot, I know they are hard to see in this photo, represents a tank. They light up red when they detect something. Basically cosmic rays hit something high in the atmosphere which sends a cascade of particles down towards earth. The cascade is sort of shaped like a cone. Some of those particles from the cascade then interact with the water in the tanks to produce flashes of light which the PMTs pickup. Based on which tanks see flashes when, the physicists are able to figure out the path of the cosmic ray, which over time would allow them to see if a cosmic rays tend to originate in select places in the universe. At least that's how I understand it.



















This is section of a mirror from another detector. There is a model of a building on the left. The building houses five of these mirrors. This section contains 9 individual mirrors, while the actual telescope has 24. These mirrors are used to detect flashes of light in the night sky from cosmic ray interactions.














Here are some of the actual PMTs. Each telescope has 440 of them, so you can think of it as being a camera with 440 pixels, the digital camera I used to take this photo has 12.1 million pixels.
















This is what one of the telescopes looks like. You can see the PMTs on the right.




















Here's a close up shot of the model of one of the buildings. Again there are four of these buildings included in the array, and I've gone to two of them Los Leones and Coihueco.



















One of the complications in using the air in the atmosphere as the detector medium is dust and air density affect how intense the flash of light is. In order to determine if the flash is dim because it was far away or if aerosols were blocking some of the light, they use lasers to take measurements of the atmosphere to calibrate their data. This photo shows what the laser looks like, but again they only open the top during calm weather at night.

Coihueco Day 2

Today we went back out to Coihueco to attach the brass ground screen to the fence as well as to try to take some survey measurements. We were able to attach the screen to the fence, but the wind proved too strong for our theodolite, as it was getting blown around. We may try again tomorrow, but if not I'm hoping we can do some sight seeing.

This is a photo looking out towards some of the detector tanks from Coihueco.






























A view of most of the instruments at Coihueco, there is also the laser building out there.

















Another view of set up. I hope this counts as a photo of me for those of you who were interested.




















A beef calf, my best guess is an Angus crossed with some type of zebu, but I can't do much better than that. I guess they also graze goats in the area around Coihueco which have been known to chew on cables.

Coihueco

Yesterday, we were finally able to make it out to the site for our experiment. They have weather monitoring stations at all the four observatory buildings as they only want to open the observatory doors when the winds are fair. Two days ago the winds were so strong that they knocked out power to the site.

This is shot of the Andes on the way out to the site which take about 40 minutes or so to get to from Malargue.














Here you can see the pad where we will be installing our dish. In the background you can see one of the observatory buildings like at Los Leones. In this photo we finished laying out the brass ground screen which serves as a big mirror for radio waves to bounce the stray signals away from our experiment.















Here's a photo of the mounting post used to hold the dish.















While we were doing all this a pair of Andean condors flew overhead. I wasn't able to get my camera out and swap lenses quick enough to get a great shot, but this is the best I have. Andean condors have the largest wingspan of any bird, over 10 ft, which is larger than the California Condors however the California Condors are longer. The Andean condors are considered to be near threatened. They can live to be over 100 years old and are an unusual bird species in that males are actually larger than females.















Here's a photo of the dish on the stand. It's about 8 feet in diameter.














Here is on of the three HEAT buildings at the site. HEAT is a German experiment that is used to look for flashes of light in the sky, but looks up at a higher angle than the other buildings. They level the building to work on the telescope inside.







































































Here's a photo of some interested painted rocks on the drive back.