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A resubmission from 6 years ago.
Perhaps I knew something then,
before my thoughts became jaded,
by living in the real world.

Feelings, at this point in life,
tend to get complicated.
Here is an earlier writing,
that tries to simplify the feeling.

3 ATs

Posted by Specola Profile 05/04/24 at 12:16PM Share Photography See more by Specola

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Despite their resemblance to R2D2, these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert region of Chile. The ATs are designed to be used for interferometry, a technique for achieving extremely high resolution observations, in concert with the observatory's 8 meter Very Large Telescope units. A total of four ATs are operational, each fitted with a transporter that moves the telescope along a track allowing different arrays with the large unit telescopes. To work as an interferometer, the light from each telescope is brought to a common focal point by a system of mirrors in underground tunnels. Above these three ATs, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the far, far away satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way. In the clear and otherwise dark southern skies, planet Earth's greenish atmospheric airglow stretches faintly along the horizon.

Photo by Yuri Beletsky

Reflections about acts often taken
without thought of the differences
they made. I miss this.

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