I will be going to Chile in March! By a happy coincidence in timing, I will be going there for both an observing run (on a sample of magnetically active brown dwarfs) and a summer school (recall that it'll be summer in the southern hemisphere) on the theoretical aspects of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope project, which aims to measure the small-scale fluctuations on the cosmic microwave background.

The observing run will be at the Carnegie Institute's observatory in Las Campañas, about 200km north of the capital Santiago, in the Atacama desert (the driest desert in the world...I'd better bring a small bottle of Evian!). Incidentally, Chile must be one of the most one-dimensional countries in the world, in that one can describe most locations in the country in terms of north or south.

We have four nights at Las Campañas from the 13th to the 17th of March, and I am pretty excited at the chance to learn some observational skills. Now here's the interesting part: since our last night is the 17th, we will finish on the morning of the 18th. I then have to travel back to Santiago, where the summer school starts on the morning of the 19th. So I have less than a day to change from a night shift to a normal day shift, which should be interesting.

I won't have much time to do actual sightseeing apart from a couple of days after the summer school, but it should be a fun and very educational experience. I can't wait...