Traditionally, the observatory has been open to visitors about 4 days per year, with perhaps 6 groups for each day. This year, they’re going to have 20 open days, but most of them will only have one group. Each visit starts at 9:45 with a visit to the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope, followed by one other telescope, and finishes before 12.00. DATE Day 2nd telescope 8th July Tues WHT or INT…
Happy Birthday Ringo Starr
And what does he want for his birthday? “Just more Peace & Love. It would be really cool if everyone, everywhere, wherever they are, at noon on July 7 make the peace sign and say ‘Peace & Love’.” That sounds like a much better present than a pair of socks and a dodgy tie.
Star Party
My friends in Franceses have amateur telescopes, and my friend in Puntagorda usually has cloudless summer nights with no street lights nearby. So we finally put the two together. The catch is that it meant camping, because the house in Puntagorda is tiny, but that made a change. It’s almost a year since I’ve been camping, partly because the previous exhibition wasn’t a success. (See Sleeping With My Best Friend’s…
Satelite Photo of La Palma
This is one photo I didn’t take myself – I wish! As you probably guessed, it’s a NASA photo, taken from the Space Shuttle. If you want to see the high-resolution version, together with some text about the geology of La Palma, and how the image was taken, click here.
More on the racism
I got an email from the people I mentioned in my last blog. When they said “foreigners” they meant people from the Peninsular, not the English, Germans, Venezuelans etc. I can stay. Then there’s a lot of stuff about why they feel they’re a separate country, and a colony. Spain (in other words some Spaniards) treated the Canaries badly in the past and therefore it’s perfectly logical to hate all…
The Swedish Solar Tower
Two of the fourteen telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory are solar telescopes — highly specialised to observe our own sun. This is the Swedish Solar Telescope, which was the first telescope built on the Roque. It’s currently the best solar telescope in the world since they added the new adaptive optics in 2005. (Adaptive optics compensate for air turbulence.) It can resolve details of the sun’s surface…