I spent my days in the run up to the occultation night slightly differently. Since I speak a decent amount of Spanish, I helped track down supplies in the town of Mendoza. These tasks provided me with the unexpected pleasure of sharing our adventures as astronomers with the citizens of Mendoza. My favorite moment was convincing two employees at Easy, the Argentine equivalent of Home Depot or Lowe’s, to cut some wood for me that the teams could use as shims to help level the telescopes out in the field. I like to say that I speak “kitchen” Spanish or “family reunion” Spanish—I can argue baseball with my relatives or swap stories about a cousin’s misadventures in childhood. However, I don’t know many hardware terms in Spanish. For example, I had no idea how to say “shims”. But we worked it out. I described what we were doing, and the employees got excited about helping us out. This is just one quick story of how local Argentines helped us with this campaign.

Every night before the event night, we practiced using the telescopes. Some team members had a lot of experience specifically with the type of telescopes we were using. Many of us did not. We came from a variety of backgrounds, including professors, engineers, and students, among others. On Tuesday, the first night, there were challenges for every team. But by Thursday night, our dress rehearsal, we were ready.

We had some fun adventures along the way. On Tuesday night, we were provided a police escort to a park just west of Mendoza, where we practiced as one giant group. The next night, we again had police escort, but we split into three teams, each going to a different campground south of Mendoza. At the campground where I worked that night, I spent part of the evening talking with the caretakers of the campground and their family. They were puzzled by the trucks that rolled up to the site and began pulling out large boxes of gear. With the help of our police escort, I explained what were were doing after which the campground caretakers were eager to help us out. Next thing I knew, I was on the phone with the nephew of one of the caretakers, telling the young man all about our project. He was clearly an astronomy fan. Later in the night I found him out in the field with us, watching the teams practice for the occultation event.

Thursday night was a complete dress rehearsal. Each team went out to their assigned site and practiced the sequence of observations that we would execute on the actual event night. The team I was on included an extremely experienced amateur astronomer, an optical engineer who was also an experienced amateur astronomer, and myself. One of the State department officials from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires also joined us. We found a ridge to the east of the highway that leads south out of Mendoza; this was one of the sites previously scouted two days before. Our only neighbor was a Catholic chapel a quarter mile west along the ridge. Otherwise we were alone, with clear skies. We found a flat spot on the ridge, parked our truck to block any wind, and set up our telescope. Everything went smoothly and we took 45 minutes of practice data. When the dress rehearsal was done, I passed around some Argentine empanadas, which we ate on top of that ridge while talking about how great a site this would be for the actual occultation event.