III / vol. 1 – 52 / 1974 – present / local —
The rule
One book
Written before bed
The observer on duty writes in the logbook before going to bed. There has been one hardbound book a year since 1974, kept on the shelf above the console, and there are 52 of them.
Most entries record the conditions, what was observed and what went wrong. Beyond that nothing is required and nobody edits them, so over fifty-two years a fair amount else has ended up in there. It is the only record here that is not in a database, and the only one anyone reads when they do not have to.
The log has never been digitised and there is no plan to digitise it. What follows is a selection, transcribed, with the volume number and the conditions as they were recorded at the head of each page. Spelling and line breaks are as written, and entries that stop mid-sentence are printed that way.
First light at 21:40. We looked at ω Centauri, because it was up and because everybody wanted to point it at something they already knew. Nine people in the chamber, which is about eight too many for the seeing. Mirror four degrees warm. Nobody cared.
Fog on the coast right up to two thousand two hundred metres. From here it is a white floor with the tops of things coming through it, and Antofagasta is somewhere underneath it with all its lights on. Observed nothing. Watched that instead.
Guiding lost at 03:40 and again at 03:58. Between the two, for about twenty seconds, the seeing went to 0.31 and I could not believe what I was looking at. Nobody awake to call. I have written the number down twice in case I stop believing it in the morning.
0.31″ is still the best seeing ever recorded here — about half the site median, and better than the telescope's own optics can really use. It has been questioned twice: in 1986, on the grounds that the guider was in a fault state, and in 2004 by the observer himself, who by then thought he had misread the display. The number stands because the strip chart from that night survived and agrees with what he wrote.
R. asked me tonight how I can stand it and I said you get used to the quiet, and he said no, the sky.
I have been thinking about that for two hours and I have not written anything else down.
Secondary focus drifting forty microns an hour, direction consistent with the truss. Compensating by hand. Whoever has the morning: it is not the temperature sensor. I checked the temperature sensor. It is the truss.
Marta says the road is out at Km 174 — the wash took the culvert some time on Sunday. Second night nobody has arrived and third night nobody has left. Kitchen inventory is in the back of this book. We have flour.
The road reopened on 9 November, seven days later. The inventory is still in the back of Volume 21 — four pages of it, in Marta Reyes's handwriting. The entry for 8 November reads, in full: bread.
First full night on the new drive. It is silent. Twenty-five years of listening to that mount to know where it was pointing and now I have to look at a screen.
It is better in every way I can measure. I still miss being able to hear it, and I will not write that again.
Dome will not rotate past 218°. Franz has gone out to the drive with a lamp. I am on the console and I have been listening to him not come back for eleven minutes and then ——
The entry ends there. Franz Oyarzún came back at 01:56, carrying a limit switch that had frozen solid in its housing, and the enclosure was turning again by 02:20. The observer's next entry, four nights later, begins About Monday. Nothing follows it. Both pages are reproduced as they were written.
Nine satellite trails across a twenty-minute exposure. In 1974 that number was zero. Field 6 will have to be re-taken. I have nothing useful to say about it so I am writing it down here where somebody will find it.
Closed at 06:14 with the light already up behind the Sierra. Good night — 0.58 the whole way through, no wind, nothing to report and eleven hours of it.
The plateau went pink for about ninety seconds on the way down and I stood outside for all of it.
Volume 52 is on the shelf above the console. Tonight's page has not been written yet.
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