I was quite worried about stargazing on Friday, because I was out of practice and the weather report was distinctly dodgy. Actually it all went well. I particularly enjoyed the little kids who were looking through a telescope for the first time. Witha bit of luck I set someone on their first steps to enjoying science. I was hoping to show people a crescent Venus (yes, it goes through phases…
Life has been happening too fast to blog about. It’s nearly all good things but I’ve struggled to keep up. For example, on Wednesday I abandoned a Nobel Prize winner in a broken down car. Yes really. The Canarian Astrophysics Institute hosted a big partical physics conference on the island, all about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is an instrument on the ISS. (It measures antimatter in cosmic rays, with…
Santa Cruz de La Palma used to have a shipyard. One of the largest ships they built was La Verdad, 485 tons displacement, which was wrecked on a reef south of Bermuda shortly after a hurricane in 1899. Luckily the water was shallow and the crew, cargo and bell were saved, although the first mate apparently had a terrible job to persuade the captain to leave. Thomas Cox, a retired…
Yesterday I saw a jade vine in flower for the first time in my life. As you can see, it’s not really jade coloured, much less emerald (the other name for the plant) but it is very pretty. After a bit of googling I discovered that it’s in the pea family, and the Latin name is Strongylodon macrobotrys and it comes from the Phillipines.
I spent the week before Easter visiting family in Swaledale. I’d forgotten how beautiful it is. The town itself is really nice, full of old buildings and charm. It also has a castle, and I ate some memorable fish and chips under the castle wall with a view of the river. Like most castles, it’s built on higher ground, so you get a great view from the Castle Walk –…