Astronomers have found a diamond half the size of Jupiter. Like most planets outside our solar system, nobody’s seen it. In this case, the astronomers were looking at its parent star (a pulsar) and found that the star was being pulled slightly backwards and forwards by the mass of a planet, something as heavy as Jupiter and orbiting very close to the star indeed – just 600,000 kilometres, or 1.5…
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 has been used for about 1,500 scientific…
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.
Friday night is the best meteor shower of the year, the Perseids. Of course it should be visible all over the planet, but La Palma’s astronomical viewpoints will probably be a particularly good place to see shooting stars. Unfotunately the full moon will spoil the show quite a bit. Astrotour will be in La Polvacera bsketball court from 9 pm – 11:30 pm with telescopes. This year, the island’s annual…
Tonight is the biggest meteor shower of the year, the Perseids. In Spanish, they’re called the tears of St Lawrence, because St Lawrence’s day is the 10th. Astrotour will be at La Polvacera basketball court. From 8 – 9 pm they’ll hold workshops and from 9pm to 11:30, observation with telescopes. If there’s low cloud, you’ll get a better view up at one of the astronomical viewpoints. Enjoy!
Two of the fourteen telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory are solar telescopes — highly specialised to observe our own sun. This is the Swedish Solar Telescope, which was one of the first telescopes built on the Roque. It’s currently the best solar telescope in the world since they added the new adaptive optics in 2005. (Adaptive optics compensate for air turbulence.) It can resolve details of the…