In early September, Phil Massey and I flew back to Las Campanas to observe for 2 nights on the Baade 6.5-m Magellan telescope using MagE, a moderate resolution optical echelle spectrograph. Though the seeing was awful (between 1.5 - 3” !!!), we still managed to find some red supergiant + B star binaries in the Magellanic Clouds. We even found two new Be star binaries! This data will eventually be used to determine the binary fraction of red supergiants for my thesis.

The night after we observed we woke up to a surprise – it had snowed! It is certainly special seeing such precipitation in one of the driest places on earth.

(photo by Phil Massey)