The whole island of La Palma is volcanic, but it’s extremely young. The oldest rocks are only about three million years old, so there’s no dinosaur fossils here. Much of the island is basalt – a dark grey rock which tends to form hexagonal columns, like the Giant’s Causeway or Los Organos on La Gomera. Over thousands of years it weathers to a lighter grey or brownish-grey. The red rocks…
Most of the telescopes at the observatory here look spectacular even from the outside. SuperWASP looks like a big garden shed. It’s the white thing at bottom left. Even when it opens up, it still doesn’t look like a professional telescope. To me, it looks more like a small missile launcher. The equipment isn’t that spectacular either. As modern telescopes go, it was built for peanuts. It has eight cameras,…
This is wht the MAGIC webcam is showing tonight. Very Christmassy, don’t you think?
Have a wonderful Christmas, (or whatever else you celebrate). I hope 2014 brings you whatever you most hope for.
A remarkable number of the archeological sites on La Palma line up with astronomical calendar events: particularly sunrise or sunset at the solstice or equinox, and the rising and setting of the star Canopus. Since Sunday was the equinox, I went with a group of friends to one of these sites to see the sun rise behind the highest point of the island, the Roque de Los Muchachos. It…
The William Herschel Telescope at sunset. . The William Herschel Telescope was for many years the biggest and best optical telescope in Europe (until GranTeCan opened in 2009). The main mirror is 4.2 m across (165″, or 13′ 9″) which astronomers call “a good light bucket”. It’s rather old as world-class telescopes go, since it opened in 1987, but it still produced excellent science. In fact data from the WHT…