Yay! I’m back at Rivendell for the weekend. Only I have to say it’s not as good as last time. It’s better! There are kittens and I’ve got wi-fi, which is why I can upload this post. This time, the place is petty full.We all had a BBQ last night. As so often happens with BBQs, we ate far later than expected, but we had a good time. I love…
The Canarian Tourist Board will be live streaming tonight’s lunar eclipse at http://www.thebestclimateintheworld.com/geminidas Just to remind you, the moon is at almost its closest approach to the Earth, so it’s will be a supermoon – noticeably bigger than usual. There are two parts to the Earth’s shadow: the penumbra is the outer part, and the umbra is the much darker inner part. Penumbral Eclipse begins 28 Sep, 00:11:47 The penumbral…
..after you made other plans. Here’s what was supposed to happen today: I had a group of students to show around two telescopes. Since they were going up in a bus from Los Cancajos and the weather forecast was poor, I arranged to drive to Los Cancajos, leave my car there, and go up with them in the bus. This would avoid the usual confusion created by bad weather…
Looking east towards Tenerife. The highest point of the island is the Roque de Los Muchachos, at 2,426m (8,000 ft) above sea level. Most days of the year, the view is spectacular. Even when it’s raining at sea-level, the summit is nearly always above the clouds. In fact, you can often look down on a sea of clouds surrounding the island. Of course that’s one reason why the observatory…
Teaser: “The Island” – La Palma Time Lapse Video from Christoph Malin on Vimeo. Enjoy Christoph Malin’s wonderful time-lapse video of La Palma. He very nearly does the place justice.
The heart of La Palma is the Caldera de Taburiente. Caldera is a technical geological term for the crater at the top of a volcano. In fact the term comes from La Palma: all the volcanic calderas in the world were named after ours. So it’s really a pity that, since then, the scientists have found out that the Caldera de Taburiete isn’t a caldera. It was actually formed by…