Ragnar's World: To HESS and back

"I thought you were going to Windhoek today!"
"'Were going' is the keyword. But I will never get there unless I can get this stupid camera to work!" the technician at H.E.S.S. said and smiled. Notoriousnly unstable, the several ton heavy cameras are prone to failure. "It works perfectly during the day, but when night falls? Pfff!" he said and shook his head.

A smaller group of us had opted to go to the H.E.S.S. observatory a few miles away from the guest farm. It is the biggest of its kind in the world, and is looking for high energy bursts from deep space. The trip to the observatory was filled with animal observations. And two of those was a first for me.
"Meerkats!" one of the guys in the car cried out. Sure enough, beside the road, running away from our cars, was a group of them. In their typical fashion, they stood on their feet and watched this parade of weirdos driving pass them. Taking pictures. I didn't have much zoom on my camera, so they only became shadows in the distance.

Timon and family

Earlier on the trip, we had encountered two warthogs trying to find a hole in the fence to go through. So it was fitting. Timon and Pumbaa!

Pumbaa and bro

This was my second time to the observatory. I never tire looking at these giant telescopes. Searching for signs of high energy particles hitting the Earth's atmosphere. The dimensions of these things are ginormous. The telescopes are the biggest optical telescopes in the world. And their cameras have weights measured in tons, not grams and kilos. The mirrors are segmented and made up of hundreds of smaller mirrors, all focused at the camera in front. The flashes of light they are looking for, are extremely short, measured in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second. So they need a lot of processing power to be able to detect and record them. A computing bank with 100 multicore processors work in unison to handle the load of data.

As seen from the access road

The big one

Camera module. The small model...

Selfie in the telescope mirrors

Thin and in big numbers

The big scope mirror showing the technicians climbing the BIG
model camera...

Whacha lookin' at?

Back at the farm, I enjoyed taking pictures of giant insects and some baboons that always roamed the area around the farm. I hadn't seen much of them in my previous trips, but I guess that was due to me arriving a bit later in the season when the temperature was to low for them.

The following is a kind of grasshopper that doesn't have the ability to hop. It is big, but doesn't bite or sting. And it eats its own kind, if given the possibility.

Devouering its sibling with great verocity. You could actually hear the
munching of the shell

Outside one of the observatories, I found this gigantic grasshopper. It was 6-7 cm long, and (almost) perfectly camouflashed to its surroundings. I only noticed it because it jumped. I approached it slowly and managed to take these images.

The baboons often paid us a visit. During breakfast one morning, they even managed to get into the enclosed area around the main building. The landlady chased them out with clapping and noises. But they stayed in the area.

Last night was the final dinner here. We are going home today, and I am sitting here in my room, blogging while packing. It has been a very good week. We have been able to do a lot of observing and I have been capturing a lot of photons in my camera. I am looking forward to processing them when I get home. It is always sad to go. There is so much more I want to see. So much more I want to image. But all good things must come to an end. And so it does here too. I put my camera up outside of the dining room, and let it sit there and take photos of the sunset.

The wind started to pick up as we sat at the dinner table. And when we got out, it was very strong. Too strong for observing. But luckily not for imaging. So the two of us doing that, set up our gear as usual and started imaging. But the rest sat inside talking and waiting for the wind to die down. It didn't, and most of them went to bed early. That was probably for the best. Personally, my night was spotty. I had to get up every 2-3 hours to change the position the camera was pointing, and to pack my gear. Today it is still blowing. I have packed most of my stuff into my backpack and will help disassemble some of the telescopes we have been using here in an hour or so. Then lunch, and then the long trip back to the airport.

Will I be back? Who knows? I want to, but having been here three times makes me wonder if I should take a break and do something else next year. Only time will tell. This is Ragnar, amateur astrophotographer, checking out of Namibia for now.
Here are some of the earlier processing of my images taken here this time. Enjoy! (click on them to get larger versions)

The galaxy Centarus A, with it's characteristic dust band. At the lower left one can see a small
background edge-om galaxy. The original image (this is cropped) was dotted with these.