9/23-24, an equinox weekend in Okanagan, 4~5 hours east of Greater Vancouver, just north US border. Much dryer there.
Our first stop is Othello Tunnels in Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park in the town of Hope. This is an engineer marvel of 1915. Well worth a visit. Vertical canyon walls, swift and clear water, historic trestles. Lots of people. Last time I visited these tunnels in the summer of 2005.Drove along Coquihalla Hwy, stopped at the summit area. Too bad, no views to be had. I hiked here once with a group of strangers many years ago. Great view once you are higher up. For now, we continued driving, until we refilled gas in West Kelowna, ~2 hours away. Should have made a stop on the road side before heading downhill towards Okanagan Lake, for a good view of the valley.
We stopped by Okanagan Lake Provincial Park outside of Summerland. Didn't go all the way down to the camping area. The lake is very large. There're multiple parks along its shore. We also stopped at a beach park called Peach Orchid Park. Further south another big lake (Skaha Lake). 
We made our last photo stop at Vaseux Lake before checking into the hotel at Osoyoos. Already dark.
Dinner was at Owl Pub, recommended by the front desk at the hotel. Very much enjoyed the view from the balcony. Drink is pricy (beer is $7 and cider is $8) and slow, but food is reasonably priced ($14-16). Stick with traditional dishes. We had prime rib and baked potato, steak fajita, and seared ahi salad - the first two are much better than the last one. 
The next morning we visited the spit of land in the middle of Osoyoos Lake, Haynes Point Provincial Park. It looks like a dike made on the lake. Some of the campsites have great view of the lake. Quite busy. Almost all sites were taken. Saw two park vehicles cleaning/patrolling the ground. There's a trail at the beginning of the dike (next to the shore) for birds. Probably quite marshy.
My objective of coming to Osoyoos is not water sports nor fishing, but this Spotted Lake. Overcast and gray. May have to come again in the heat of summer (when more water is evaporated so all the minerals are more concentrated, and a blue sky for better reflection) or when snow falls for different colors. I just cannot bear the thought of coming to this dry area in summer.
We spent over an hour at Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO). This turns out to be the highlight for me. On the way there, we drove by this little pond covered with bright green algae on Willowbrook Rd. If it were not ducks swimming on it, I would think it were grass mixed with mud. This could be caused by the nutrient runoff of the farm that surrounds the pond.DRAO is open to public year round M-F 10am-5pm. Between Easter and Canadian Thanksgiving (2nd Monday of Oct), guided tours are offered on weekends on-demand. Without the guide, we would have no idea what to look at. We have to park outside, and walk half a KM to the facilities along the Synthetic Telescopes. This is to prevent the the radio wave of your car key interfere with the experiments. We saw 2 cars inside, probably older models without remote lock. Cellphones have to be turned off (airplane mode is not good enough). Yes, bring a camera.
There were two guests in the visitor center when we arrived. They were here before. So today, the focus of our tour is the newly installed (~5 years ago) CHIME: Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. After some theory and description, we were led to walk under as well as on top of the cylinders. Below are copied from the brochure handed to me:Reflectors: four 20m * 100m parabolic cylinders made from metal mesh. Suspended to detect radio waves of 37 ~ 75cm wavelength. Each cylinder has 256 antennas x 2 polarizations, whose signals are amplified, and filtered for 400 ~ 800MHz, digitized at 800MHz sampling rate. After FFT, signals from any pair of antennas were sent to GPU for correlation calculation, then sent to storage.
Redshift range: 0.8 ~ 2.8 (7-11 billion years ago).
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. Immediately following the Big Bang, the universe was a hot dense plasma where matter and light were tightly coupled - it was opaque. Density fluctuations gave rise to spherical waves that expanded at the speed of sound. As the universe expanded and cooled, the electrons and protons in the plasma combined to form neutral hydrogen, which is transparent and light uncoupled from the matter. This caused the sound waves to stop moving, freezing the wave structure and leaving them with a characteristic size that can be reliably calculated using statistical methods. The over-dense regions corresponding to the frozen wave-fronts became the sites of the web-like structure we see in the universe today. This phenomenon is named as BAO, and the characteristic scale of the frozen wave-fronts provides us with a standard ruler. Even though the ripples no longer grow, the BAO structure expands as space itself expands, so the measured size tells us how far away it is.
An interaction between the electron and proton in hydrogen causes the atoms to emit radio waves with 21cm wavelength (1420 MHz). The wavelength is stretched as space expands, the length of the radio waves arriving at CHIME tells us from where they came. Mapping the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the universe is equivalent of making a map of where the matter is.
CHIME receives radio waves from many different directions at once. Signals from a given direction arrive at each antenna at systematically different times. By analyzing these delay, we can form an image of an overhead north-south stripe of the sky. As the earth rotates, it scans the sky, picking the 21cm radiation.
We also visited the small control room of the little solar disc, which is just behind the visitor center. Old electronics monitoring the 10.7cm solar radio flux.
The next eye-catching thing is the 7-element array of 9m telescopes offers wide-field continuum imaging simultaneously at 408 MHz and 1420 MHz, as well as atomic hydrogen (HI) spectroscopy across 256 channels at 1420 MHz. It is particularly suited to studying the gas and plasma that lies between the stars i.e. the interstellar medium, of both the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.
Stopped by Keremeos and bought some apples. So many fruit stands here, very large and colorful. Lots of stone fruits, apples, all sorts of pumpkins and squash, some honey and jam. Not a lot of other vegetables.
Stopped by Lightening Lake of E.C.Manning Provincial Park for a snack break. Grass is a bit brown now. Again, I was here 12 years ago in summer. We stayed in the lodge and did more hikes in the area. Today, all we used at the lodge is the restrooms. Quite a lot of cars in the resort area. 
Drove up to Cascade Lookout for a grand view of the valley and the southern mountains (including those in US). A wooden plaque points to the mountain names, but without any picture, I still cannot identify them. 
Had some fish noodle soup for dinner. Warm and tasty. It rained the next day.
