Network progress in Chile

CTIO with space for LCOGT

Derek Johnson

Room for 1m's

Room for 0.4m's

 There has been steady progress at our Cerro Tololo , Chile site over the past few month. Here are latest photos from Enrique (who is project managing the ground work for us in Chile). This might not look like much but it represents a significant advance in the readiness of the site to house telescopes. Earlier on this year the ground had some large boulders which need to be removed (or smashed up and then removed) and the whole site made level. In March 2010 the site was hit by an earthquake which reach 5.5 - 6 Richter, but none of the observatories were seriously affected and no telescopes were damaged. This is good news for us for the future.

The oblong pads are for Aqawans (which will each house 2 x 0.4m telescopes) and the circular pads for the Ash domes that will each house a 1m telescope. The Aqawan pad fence and the  guardrail for the 1.0m pad will be installed in the next few weeks. We will be painting the aqawan and 1.0m concrete pads with antistatic paint which should arrive there next week. Once the painting is done, the site is ready for us to install Ash domes, Aqawan enclosures, and site services buidlings (which will house the servers to run all each of our observatories).

Next the really exciting stuff happens - telesopes!

Thanks to Enrique and (LCOGTLas Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network alumnus) Derek Johnson for the images, and to Mike Falarski for the information.