Selfies without a cell phone
In 2001-2003 I spent a total of about three months on Calar Alto, a mountain in Andalusia that has an astronomical observatory with a couple of decently sized telescopes. It was my very first observing campaign outside of the home observatory, and I was there alone. On the days off, I hiked through the mountains for hours without anyone knowing where I was hanging out. However, it was very difficult for me to communicate with the local technicians and cooks.
During these months I took thousands of pictures of any celestial object, but not a single one of the mountain or the telescopes or of me. I didn’t have a camera and my first cell phone was almost ten years away. But there is a single picture of me, at dawn, at the end of a long night in December 2001, sometime just after Christmas. The picture was taken by a webcam hanging at the top of the dome and taking a new picture of the snow-covered landscape every few seconds. There was a walkway around the dome, the “Cat Walk”, and if you positioned yourself there, you could see the webcam.
The only problem was that I had to sit in front of the computer to save the image, and if I was standing at the top of the cat walk, I couldn’t be at the computer one floor down in the control room at the same time. I also didn’t have any friends I could ask to save a picture for me at six in the morning. The only remaining solution: In the few seconds that the webcam is idle, run downstairs and save the image before a new one is generated. It took me a few tries, but the result is wonderful.
Between 2003 and 2011 I spent a total of about two months in Chile, one in Hawaii, and another in Spain, each on spectacular desert mountains to observe something. There is absolutely no picture of all these journeys.
(Aleks Scholz)