The hospital just phoned. I go in on Wednesday evening, and they’ll be taking my gallbladder out on Thursday morning. I should be back home by the weekend. Hopefully I won’t have to wait very long after that before I can eat cheese again. And eggs. And lamb. And bacon. And nuts. And…
The big telescopes at the observatory at the Roque de Los Muchachos mostly use mirrors rather than lenses. Domestic mirrors have the aluminium behind glass to protect it, but astronomical mirrors have the aluminium on top. This gives the best image, but it also means that the aluminium slowly spoils, and has to be replaced every three years or so. This is not a simple operation. The aluminium layer is…
GranTeCan is the biggest optical telescope in the world, and it’s hard to convey the sheer size of it in a photograph. The telescope itself weighs 485 tonnes. You could fit an tennis court inside the dome, and the top of the dome is 41 m above the ground. But you can’t see any of that in a photograph. Luckily for me, the engineers did some maintenance on the massive…
Putting the Galileo’s mirror onto the carrying case, which is on the lorry. I didn’t have any guiding work yesterday, but I drove up the mountain anyway. I wanted to get photos of people moving the main mirror from the Galileo to the Herschel telescope for realuminizing. They only do this once every three years, so I was keen not to miss it. That mirror weighs about 6 tonnes, and…
I love La Palma, and I believe that most British tourists who come here love it too. But you know, you can’t please everybody all the time, and I occasionally hear of people who were very disappointed. That’s a shame when you’ve saved all year for a holiday. So who shouldn’t come? Well, the weather isn’t quite as hot as the bigger Canarian resorts. You don’t get much in the…
It’s been a busy week. I was horrified to find out yesterday that today was the last day to get my son signed up at school for the academic coming year. I’m not fond of paperwork at the best of times. It really doesn’t help that I’ve recently had to renew my British passport and help a friend with paperwork over the car she sold years ago. I really wasn’t…