From 25th September 2015 to October 9th, the island of La Palma in the Canaries will host Astrofest, a festival of astronomy, with activities for all ages and knowledge levels. There will be an international conference for astrotourism professionals, a spectacular total eclipse of the moon, an international conference for nightscape photographers, and a night photography masterclass. You can find more details and register for all these events at…
Photos of La Palma by Kai Petersen
Kai Petersen has some spectacular photos of La Palma at his website: http://www.lightpaintingfreaks.com/index.php?/albums/la-palma/ My favourites are the night photos with stars, but he also took this lovely photo of my and my friend Nevermore on a tour of the Observatory of the Roque de Los Muchachos. The website is in German, but you don’t need words to enjoy them. I really recommend a visit, because there are 37 more!
God Save the Queen concert
I’ve missed a lot of the Bajada one way and another, but we did get to the “God Save the Queen” concert last night. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a Queen tribute group. We weren’t sure how good they were, but we bought tickets on the assuption that there’s a huge gap between “As good as the original Queen” and “Worth 15€.” Are they as good as…
Izaña part 2: stargazing
Since I got there early, I got a chance to try to photograph the nearest star – our Sun, through a small telescope with a filter which lets through a wavelength called H? (pronounced H alpha). It was tricky. I’m pretty short sighted, and I can’t see well with my glasses squdged up against the viewfinder. For normal stargazing, I take my glasses off and refocus the telescope, but…
Looking for somewhere to shoot a film?
How about La Palma? It’s an incredibly photogenic and varied place, and the island council will even throw in some sweeteners.
Pluto and Google Deep Dream
Deep Dream is all over the internet lately, but for those of you who heaven’t come across it, Google have invented an ‘artificial neural network’ which finds patterns in images, and then matches them with other pictures stored in its memory. The result is seriously weird. I recently learned that some people suffer from a phobia of objects with irregular patterns of holes (Trypophobia) and they find some Deep…