In January I spent a few weeks in Mexico for work. This trip was all about meeting with collaborators and working on the SCI-HI experiment system. It was my first visit to the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Optica y Electrónica (INAOE), which is where my collaborators work and is located in Tonantzintla, near Puebla in central Mexico.
Dormitory where I stayed on the INAOE campus
The institute does a lot of work with both optical and radio telescopes. One of my collaborators particularly works on the optical telescope below, and works out of the observatory, so I got to go inside the dome.
Optical Observatory (exterior view)
Optical Telescope (inside the dome)
Walking around the INAOE campus, I also got to see some of the other telescopes.
One of the amazing things that you can see from the institute is the volcanoes around the area. The most striking is Popocatépetl, which often has smoke rising from it.
Popocatepetl, the local volcano colloquially known as “El Popo”
The major project of my time at INAOE was working on improvements to our system computer.
SCI-HI computer (work in progress)
It was great to have the opportunity to meet with collaborators and especially to get to visit another campus, particularly an international campus. One other benefit was getting out of Pittsburgh during the worst of the bitter cold weather in January and going somewhere significantly warmer (at least 40’s-50’s Fahrenheit).
Dreams from the Radio Cosmos 