A bare concrete room with a bed, a wooden chair, and one enormous window looking out onto flat pale desert.

I  /  74 m  /  built 1974  /  rebuilt 1998  /  local —

The station

The building

The telescope is on the ridge. The station is 2.4 kilometres away and 400 metres lower down, and the two buildings solve completely different problems.

The enclosure up on the ridge is arranged around a mirror. The station is arranged around people: they have to sleep through daylight, stay for 28 days at a time, and do it at 3,410 metres, where the air pressure is about two-thirds of what it is at sea level.

The 1998 rebuild replaced the original accommodation — a row of prefabricated huts meant to last four years, which lasted twenty-four — with a single bar of board-formed concrete dug into the north slope. The slope does the insulating. Three sides of the building are against earth and the fourth faces the basin in glass, which keeps the interior within a few degrees year-round without much heating.

There is no lobby. Vehicles pull into a garage at the east end and you walk in through it, past the graders, to reach anything else.

Length
74m
Rooms
11
Water, trucked
9 000L / wk
Shift
28days
The daily schedule
Station time, live

Now at the station
—
—

A day here runs roughly opposite to a normal one. Dinner is at four in the afternoon, so that the night crew eats before the enclosure opens; breakfast is at seven in the morning, for people who are about to go to bed. The kitchen holds the only clock visible from the corridor, which is most of the reason the schedule holds together.

07:00Night crew eats and the logbook is written up before anyone goes to bed.Bed by 08:30
11:00Day crew on the ridge. Mirror washed on the first Tuesday; aluminising every eighteen months, off site.Quiet hours below
14:00Truck window. Anything arriving from the coast arrives now or waits a week.Km 177 – Km 218
16:00Dinner, all hands. The only meal where everybody at the station is awake at the same time.Eleven at the table
18:00Enclosure opens at sunset so the mirror can cool to the outside air. No headlights on the ridge track after this.Vents to wind
20:00On sky. Red light only from the corridor door onward.First integration
00:00One observer and one operator on the ridge, 2.4 km from everybody else, until the enclosure closes at first light.The long half
A single small figure walking across an empty plain at dusk, casting a very long shadow.

17:52 on the track to the enclosure — 2.4 km and 400 metres of climb, about forty minutes up and twenty-five back. Most staff walk it at least once a day.

The altitude
is the easy part.

Altitude sickness lasts about a week. New arrivals sleep badly, get a headache around the third day, and are told to drink four litres of water a day. Then it passes, and their resting heart rate settles about ten beats a minute higher than it was at home.

The quiet takes longer to get used to. There is no traffic, no aircraft, no insects and no vegetation, and for most of the year very little wind, so people start hearing their own breathing and pulse. Several have reported the building settling at night. It does not settle; it is concrete poured onto rock.

This comes up in the logbook more often than the weather does. Staff who came up to measure something specific tend to write about the silence at least once.

The night log →

Heat haze shimmering over a vast empty gravel plain, distant hills dissolving into it.

13:10, looking south from the garage. In summer the basin does this from about eleven until four, and the track to the ridge is closed to vehicles while it lasts.

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02The instrument3.6 m · specification · tonight's state 03The night log1974 – present · fifty-two volumes