I was lucky enough to be able to join the belated Solstice dinner held by the Association of Starlight Guides on Tenerife. It was great to meet so many of my collegues, but best of all, the dinner as held in the Teide Observatory. I’ve been wanting to have a look inside for at least 5 years. It meant an early start. I needed the car to move around,…
I bought a wonderful calendar for 2014 with pastel paintings of nebulae by the local artist Vanessa Sancho. I like the paintings so much that I still have the calendar. Alas, there wasn’t a 2015 calendar, but there will be one for 2016. Actaully make that October 2015 – March 2017. The caldendar is bilingual (English-Spanish) with gorgeous pastel paintings, plus moon phases, and dates for equinoxes, meteor showers…
For the last few days, Venus and Jupiter have been very close together in the evening sky. I wanted to take photos on Wednesday and Thursday, but it was cloudy. I wished I’d asked to go up to the observatory, above the clouds. Lucky me, I got permission to go there on Friday evening to take photos. I’m really glad I made the effort.
Well that was an interesting talk. There have been no massive asteroid impacts in living memory, so it’s easy to forget that they exist. The scientists are pretty confident they’re tracking 96% everything over a kilometre in diameter. Those happen just once every 700,000 years, which is good because they hit with the equivalent of 60,000 million tons of TNT. The worry is the smaller ones. A 40m-wide asteroid…
Asteroid Day is the anniversary of the Tunguska event in 1908, when a huge asteroid exploded over Siberia. There will be a free public event on Tuesday 30th of June at 19:00 at Palacio Salazar in Santa Cruz de La Palma. SCHEDULE: 19:00 – Welcome & keynote lecture 19:10 – Talks given by astronomers Speakers: Elena Nordio (Ad Astra La Palma) Vania Lorenzi (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo) Massimo Cecconi (Telescopio…
Remember Rosetta, the spaceship orbiting a comet and the lander that bounced into the shade? The lander wasn’t getting enough sunlight to power it, so it went into hibernation in November last year. Now that the comet is nearer the sun there’s more light, plus the comet’s evaporating away and the valley’s less deep now. Philae’s woken up, and ESA are hoping to get their mitts on all that…