Hi everyone! Yes, we are still alive just been trotting around South Africa and fighting without decent internet. I’m finally at a spot with a good connection and taking a little bit of time this morning to upload pictures and get this update to you!
We are now safely at our last stop on the Eastern side of South Africa at our LTO site. Our little R&R in Cape Town was very much enjoyed and I feel we made the best of it. So our couple days as a tourist had us down near the V&A Waterfront (pictured above). It has much more of the feel of something that I would anticipate at home. A big touristy, shopping area right on the water. Having this walking distance from the hotel was a bonus! If you kept walking past the waterfront you make it to more of a boardwalk. On Max’s birthday, we headed out there to catch sunset:
For dinner that night, Max chose a jazz club which we were both excited about. Unfortunately, it was more background/elevator jazz but I’m always a fan of live music, so it was a treat.
Earlier in the day, Max was unfortunately not feeling too well so he stuck around the waterfront reading, working and exploring a little. I went and hiked to Table Mountain (the mountain in the backdrop of the first picture). It was fun leaving from the hotel and walk up there, it took me through downtown Cape Town then up and up to the top. Here are some pictures from that little walkabout:
How can you read the sign and not?
Stumbled across a big dog park, these guys were sure enjoying the fountain (their owners probably not so much!)
View from the top of Table Mountain.
And the view down from where I was sitting:
The next day, we were able to sneak in a soccer game at Cape Town Stadium. It was pretty neat watching a game in a stadium that hosted the World Cup back in 2010, but it was definitely a little run down and no where near capacity! Listed capacity is over 64,000 and there were maybe 1,500 there. Those 1,500 sure were passionate though! You can see the stadium in my view from the top of Table Mountain as well (-:
So as you can see in those photos, in our short little period of time in Cape Town we maximized it.
We have now been at LTO for a few days and are making progress. So far we have taken everything out of the observatory and started to put things back in place. 4 new sensors are going in here, so this requires a little bit of reshuffling for us to get it together. Everyone has a home now, so it is a matter of getting all other equipment properly mounted/placed then finishing up the telescope connections. It is always eye-opening to walk into a shed after we haven’t been there in a long time to see how out-dated a lot of our work is! This is the first real time we have had our hands on this shed since install back in 2015.
Talk with everyone later on the all hands call. Guess that is later today for me and tomorrow for you!
Cheers,
MJ
Thnx MJ, great stuff !!
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