We have a new member of the family. Chai arrived on Tuesday evening. We don’t know her parentage or exact age because she’s a found cat. To be precise, she was found by the neighbours of a friend of a friend. Luckily for her and luckily for us, I’d been asking around for kittens in need of a home. Everyone’s happy. It’s been a busy week, but this morning we…
Photo of the week: the zodiacal light
It’s a funny thing, but the photos look very different on the desktop computer to the laptop – I hope this looks reasonable on your computer or phone.. You can only ever see the zodiacal light in really dark places, in the east about an hour before dawn, or in the west an hour after sunset. I took this photo from my balcony. It’s caused by dust in the plane…
Photos of the Week: Fuencaliente Salt Works
I spent much of the week helping out with a peer review of La Palma’s dark skies and astrotourism, run by Interreg Europe. A group of two people from each place visits each place in turn to look at what local people are doing and to suggest improvements. My role was translating and tour guiding. It was fun, but tiring. On Tuesday the group finished up at El jardin de…
Picture of the week: The Large Size Telescope uncovered
I went up to the Roque to do some tour guiding, and found the LST looking very different. The cover’s gone from the spectacular mirror! I used to think that nothing would ever make the MAGIC look small. Less noticable, but just as important, the camera is in place. It’s the white box just above the tower. The inauguration will be October 10th.
Sunday photo: bees on a palm flower
My car failed it’s technical inspection on Friday. Yesterday I went to Los Cancajos to get a hire car while my own is fixed, and I saw this Canary palm tree in flower. Wikipedia tells me it’s a male flower. Canary palm trees are a kind of wild date palm. You can eat the dates; you just wouldn’t want to, since they’re small, the pit is large and they’re much…
Photo of the week: Caldera de Taburiente from Los Andennes
Life is busy. I’m getting more tour guidg work than expected, which is great, but it does make it hard to get on with the writing. I’d hoped to send the 3d edition of “A Breathtaking Window” off to the printers by now, and I haven’t even finished writing it, much less got the layout and proof reading done. I still hope to have it on sale by Christmas. And…