Hi again everybody. Well, yes, this will be the continuation of yesterday’s post. And the sun is back.

The altiplanic winter is long over… still the weather on the Chajnantor plateau is not without surprises. We do not expect excellent conditions in April/May, but usually at least we can observe.

Today the ESO council has made a decision that many astronomers (and not only them) were waiting for quite a while.

This post actually should have been written a week ago, since the Maratón de Santiago was on April 11th. Still I was hoping that the organizers manage the problem with the time measurements they had, but they didn’t.

Last week, we got a new toy at APEX. As I mentioned in earlier posts, we are in altiplanic winter time now, and this time is not used for science operations, but rather for installations, upgrades, and maintenance.

Let me continue with some experiences connected to the strong earthquake that hit Chile on 27th of February. Although I personally did not suffer big damage, it was kind of weird to see the rest of the world returning to normality so fast.

Sorry for not posting any update here on the situation after the strong earthquake that hit Chile in the morning of 27th February during the last week. As you can imagine, we here in Chile were quite busy with other things than posting, and as far as pure information is concerned, you could be informed through the media.

I planned to write a post about the work we do at APEX during the altiplanic winter, but sometimes plans change unexpectedly. I suppose most of you have seen the news about the earthquake in Chile.

Would you expect to find a variety of strange animal species close to observatories? No, I’m not talking about astronomers this time ;-). Actually, there’s not so much wildlife around our telescope itself, at 5100 meters altitude. But there’s quite a lot close to our base camp.

The IYA 2009 is over for more than a month now. And it ended rather silently, as far as my posts in the Cosmic Diary are concerned.