HARPS-N Inauguration
The HARPS-N spectrograph was inaugurated on April 23rd. Here’s some photos. This write up is better late than never, I hope.
telescopes
Inauguration of the Liverpool Annex
Today they inaugurated the annex building to the Liverpool telescope. The Liverpool is the joint largest robotic telescope in the world, with a 2 m mirror. Since there’s nobody at the telescope at night, it was built with very little in the way of workshops. But the new building contains a workshop to assemble and test new instruments, and a control room, to help humans commission them. Of course…
The William Herschel Telescope
The William Herschel Telescope was for many years the biggest and best optical telescope in Europe (until GranTeCan opened in 2009). The main mirror is 4.2 m across (165″, or 13′ 9″) which astronomers call “a good light bucket”. It’s rather old as world-class telescopes go, since it opened in 1987, but it still produced excellent science. In fact data from the WHT has been used for about 1,500 scientific…
NOT a place I’ve been before
In all my 11 years of working at the Roque as a software engineer, I never visited the Nordic Optical Telescope. We used to joke that it was NOT one of ours. And in two years of tour guiding up there, I never went in either. It was NOT on my programme. But now I’m writing an e-book about the observatory, and it’s NOT a good idea to write about…
Snow at the Roque
La Palma has a lovely sub-tropical climate. It’s called the land of eternal spring. But today the top of the mountain is covered with snow. Of course, we only ever get snow at high altitude, and these days, we don’t get snow every winter. But when it snows, it can dump several feet in one night. The Roque is one of the three best sites in the world for…
Stargazing
The island’s association of amateur astronomers will be holding a star party on Saturday, from 8pm, behind the trees in the plaza beside the tourist office in El Paso. There will be lots of amateur telescopes there, so you can get a good look at, say, Saturn or Jupiter, and they plan to be there until midnight. I gather they speak some English. La Palma has amazing skies. This is…