Snow
Thursday, October 14. 2004
Les Houches, France (Feb 6, 2002)
In February 2002 I went to a winter school in Les Houches, on the french side of the Mont Blanc. The school was about the VLTI interferometer, the new crown jewel of the European Southern Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile. The VLTI (Very Large Telescope Interferometer) can use up to three of the four 8m telescopes of the VLT simultaneously, to obtain images with unprecedented visual acuity. Interferometry is just beginning as a practical way of doing astronomical observations in the optical and the infrared (while has been widely used in radio-astronomy for decades) and the VLTI is one of the first large instrument devoted to this technique. The purpose of the school was to prepare astronomers to take advantage of this new facility.
The place was really nice. One morning we woke up and everything was covered by a white mantle of fresh snow. The photo portraits the view from my dorm room. The beauty of the mountains and the dedication of the people at the school (both the organizers and the participants) are the two things that I remember more of those days. The other thing that I remember is that unfortunately I got a very bad toothache and I had to live with it until the end of the school.
