During the month of December 1996 I have been for the first time to the La Silla Observatory, as part of the NTT Upgrade project (as the picture on top of this page proves).
This has been for me really a great experience, because I have been able for the first time to put my hands on a telescope and to verify that, believe it or not, my software can really do something similar enough to what it is supposed to do. To see your code running on the real thing is completely different than just running tests on it.
To live for one month in La Silla and to work with the NTT team has been another great plus of this duty trip. The atmosphere in the group is great, despite the pressure and the tough schedule.
My activity during this period consisted mainly in the integration of the VLT Telescope Control Software and in the setup and testing of the Active Optics and Auto Guiding modules. Obviously this has involved a lot of debugging, bug fixing and dealing with many un-foreseen problems and emergencies, but at the end everything went fine. You can find more details in my:
Here are now just a few screen capture of the NTT User Interface and of nice Sky images taken during the tests (For every image there are a reduced size version and a full size version, both in gif format. Unfortunately the quality of the images is limited by color resolution problems):
Despite the very tough schedule I found even some time to relax, enjoying the beautiful and unusual desertic landscape, the silence and the loneliness. I had even the time to go walking in the desert.
Last modified: Thu Dec 30 15:01:24 MET 1999
