CERN Open Days 2008

This weekend was probably the last chance for the public to see the LHC and all its experiments.
I took part in quite a few visits (ATLAS, LHC, ALICE, CMS, LHCb, LHC control room, see pictures and my gallery) on Saturday (which was open only for CERN members and their families) and did about 7 tours (of one hour each) of the ATLAS detector on Sunday.

It has been a tremendous success and CERN managed to allow underground visits for a stunning number of 11.000 people on Saturday and 20.000 people on Sunday. The total number of visitor was estimated to be 23.000 on Saturday and 53.000 on Sunday.

ATLAS itself managed bring down about 2.200 visitors on Saturday and 3.500 visitors on Sunday. With tours starting roughly every 15 minutes we still had people waiting for about 4 hours to get to see the experiment.

I think, besides minor details, it has been a great success and I had a lot of fun showing people around and explaining them the LHC, ATLAS and many other things, even though I was completely wasted after about 9 hours of guiding (about 7 tours) and cleaning up and so forth.

I love that shit ;-)