Sonoita, Arizona, USA

So I recently (17 - 21 September 2011) spent some time visiting the Winer Observatory in Sonoita, Arizona. I went down there to help Rob Siverd (the guy who does everything KELT related) fix the KELT-North telescope. They've been having some problems with the telescope not knowing where in sky it was pointing and we managed to trace the problem to some faulty "homing" sensors on the telescope mount. We managed to get it fixed in fairly short time, but let me first show you what Sonoita looks like ...

The image shows the view from the "lounge" of the observatory hostel, which is actually just the people who run the observatory's house. I was "unfortunate" to use this space as my sleeping quarters for a few days :)

So this is what the observatory looks like. It's just one big "garage" with a machine shop and warm room on the bottom and a big slide off roof on top with a few telescope underneath. Some of the telescope under the roof include DEMONEX, KELT-North and some telescope owned by the University of Iowa. The site is located about 30 miles north of the border with Mexico and Sonoita itself has a very large Border Patrol facility. The town itself only has one stop sign. I'd have to say that it's even smaller than Sutherland !!!

Here you can see some of the telescopes. On one of the days we needed a part for the telescope and drove the 45 minutes to Tucson. On the way there we first made a stop at the hardware store in Sonoita and this is the sign above the door that greeted us ... Next we encountered an aircraft graveyard ...

As far as the eye could see there were planes. Big ones, little ones, fat ones, skinny ones, broken ones, not so broken ones ... you name it, it was there.

So all in all, a good trip down to the south of the USA. Got stopped once by Border Patrol, ate lotsa awesome ribs and steak.