My ebook, “A Breathtaking Window on the Universe: a guide to the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory” will be on sale in few months. It explains why the observatory is on La Palma and how a telescope works, and gives details of each telescope, plus many anecdotes and over 60 photos. You can get full details on this site as soon as they’re available.
Happy New Year. Are we all going to die? Yes. That was certain as soon as we were born. But is the whole world going to end? No. Well there’s always the small chance that some crazy person will do something incredibly stupid with nuclear weapons, but that’s about the same every year. Is the Earth going to collide with planet Nibiru? No. If there was anything that big…
The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to the Supernova Cosmology Project, which used distant supernova to measure the expansion of the universe, and prove that the expansion is accelerating. The Supernova Cosmology Project was a big job, and it has 32 co-authors, including M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente from the University of Barcelona, who contributed observations from the William Herschel Telescope and the Isaac Newton Telescope, both at…
La Palma now has 25 businesses that specialise in astrotourism to some degree. (It’s not surprising: all you have to do is look up on a cloudless night to see why) These businesses got together between November 24th and 30th to swap ideas on how to help each other give tourists a good time. There were talks and excursions to restaurants that offer stargazing with…
Most of La Palma has good weather nearly all year. But the observatory is up at 2400 m (almost 8,000 ft) and occasionally in winter dramatic storms come howling in, dump half a metre of snow overnight, and disappear almost as fast as they came. If you’re planning a trip to the observatory between November and March, be sure to check the road conditions before you leave. You can…
