It seemed counter-intuitive that my main experience of New Mexico is of rain, but that's what I've had plenty of. It turns out that July is considered the 'monsoon' season around here, and especially around the mountains I've seen nary a peek of sunshine through the everpresent clouds.

My arrival at Apache Point was not without incident. I flew into El Paso airport on the Texas-NM border, and rented a car. From a certain point of view, it can be argued that I am not qualified to drive (I have never driven on the right-hand side before, and I have not driven at all for close to a year). There is a 100-mile drive to Apache Point from El Paso, some 20 miles which involve mountain roads, so it was a fun experience to hit the road.

Most of the trip from El Paso to Alamogordo, the nearest big town to APO, involved long stretches of desert road, under clear blue sky. By the time I had ascended to the Sacramento Mountains where the APO is, the sky was shrouded in clouds. However, by the time my allocated time arrived, the sky had cleared enough to see the Milky Way. This being my first solo observing run, and also since I had never used the APO 3.5 metre telescope before, it took me nearly two hours of fumbling about with calibrations before I could start taking science data. Lo and behold, with less than 20 minutes of data taken, clouds started rolling in .

The next couple of nights were little different. At some parts of the the 2nd night, the cloud cover was thin enough that I could take data n a couple of the brightest objects on my target list, but otherwise I spent the entire night wandering through the World Wide Web.

During the day, I spent a few hours hiking through the nearby hills and forests, although the otherwise stunning views were spoiled by...clouds. Yesterday, I had tramped some 4 miles away from the observatory when the heavens opened up with a thunderstorm, and within minutes I was soaked to the bone.

With my 3 days done and laughably little data to show for it, the only positive I can take out from this is that I am now qualified to operate the 3.5m remotely (the entire purpose of the trip was to train me to use the telescope). So the next time I wrestle with the New Mexico weather, it will be from the Peyton Hall basement in Princeton.