Politics

Forget it if you think Paranal is just engineering and state of the art science. Like in every situation, from million-dollar business to daily life, it is also about politics, in fact, it is a lot about politics. Yesterday, ESO invited the member state ambassadors in Chile and the chilean external relations vice-minister to visit Paranal. The whole day, at the Paranal entrance, the flags of the visiting ambassadors' countries were up and waving, Portugal included.

In the middle of the afternoon I was called by radio. They were looking for a portuguese to add to the commission. That's how I, in the end of the afternoon, met the portuguese ambassador and his wife, as well as some other influent ESO people I hadn't met before. The Ambassador was actually the only person I was missing to meet at the Embassy and he showed himself very friendly and a great benfiquista. We went to see the opening of one of the telescopes and had a cocktail and dinner afterwards. It was really weird to have dinner at the Paranal cantine following the protocol. Afterwards, they took us to the control room, where science happens at night. Outside, under the most magnificent moonless sky, we saw the mediatic ex libris of Paranal: the 90km range laser, pointing out of Yepun, the forth telescope, a yellow ray crossing the entire darkness of the star-dotted sky, creating artificial stars to aid astronomers in correcting the atmosphere turbulence. Indescribable view! Paranal is getting more interesting everyday and I keep loving to meet people, whoever people...

© by Gerhard Hudepohl (aka my boss!)