The island’s association of amateur astronomers will be holding a star party on Saturday, from 8pm, behind the trees in the plaza beside the tourist office in El Paso. There will be lots of amateur telescopes there, so you can get a good look at, say, Saturn or Jupiter, and they plan to be there until midnight. I gather they speak some English. La Palma has amazing skies. This is…
Last summer and this spring, I got several mornings work as a tour guide, showing people around either the William Herschel Telescope, or the Isaac Newton Telescope. Today was my first go at the new-style open days at the observatory (see my blog about the island) where I have to give a general talk about the observatory first, then take them to the MAGIC telescope (and maybe give the explanations…
This is one photo I didn’t take myself – I wish! As you probably guessed, it’s a NASA photo, taken from the Space Shuttle. If you want to see the high-resolution version, together with some text about the geology of La Palma, and how the image was taken, click here.
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 the first telescope 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 sun’s surface…
I feel I’m crawling out from under an avalanche of paperwork. I’ve sent off my son’s passport application and collected his last Primary school report – and picked up a the official application for him to start High School. Now for the last seventeen years I’ve had plenty of practice speaking (mostly informal) Spanish, but very little practice writing it. And these forms are formal. My son even has to…
GranTeCan, the huge new Spanish telescope La Palma is home to one of the three most important astronomical observatories in the world. (The other two are Hawaii and the Atacama desert in Chile.) The observatory sits at the top of the island, at the Roque de los Muchachos. It’s a fascinating place to visit, but it’s not normally open to tourists – they’re too busy doing science. You can visit…