Last night I went to the delayed Sardine’s Funeral in Los Sauces. I finally discovered why people say it’s better than the sardine’s funeral in Santa Cruz. They say it because it’s true. The crowd was far bigger than in Santa Cruz, and over half of them wore fancy dress – mostly Halloween theme costumes. This is my hairdresser. I didn’t recognise him nutil he spoke. First they had a…
And the blue sky on that last one that gives the game away. Yes, it’s Earth, not Mars. It’s actually the Teneguia volcano, on the southern tip of La Palma. The red colouring comes from iron in the rocks. The reason why there’s no visible vegetation is that the volcano last erupted in 1971, just 37 years ago. Some of these little holes in the ground (just big enough to…
Hurrah! After seventeen years on the island, I finally got to the summit of the volcano Teneguia. It’s only 400 m above sea-level, and I didn’t walk all that far. But I’m horribly unfit and it’s a rough path. And besides, I have a horrible tendency to leave everything to some mythical day in the future when I won’t be so busy. So I’m proud of myself for getting up…
This is the MAGIC telescope (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope). It’s perhaps the most exotic telescope at the observatory at the Roque de los Muchachos. It’s not an optical telescope. Instead of observing visible light, it’s looking for gamma rays. Visible light is made up of different wavelengths, which give the different colours from red to violet. Wavelengths which are just a bit too short to see form ultra-violet…
Los Sauces always hold their Sardine’s Funeral a week or two after Santa Cruz. It was supposed to happen on Saturday, but we had an orange weather alert. The rain poured and the wind gusted, and it was obvious that nobody was going out if they could help it. In one way it’s a good thing – the reservoirs were very low after such a dry winter. It’s finally stopped…
Yesterday I clean forgot that in December last year they found out that the giant Canarian lizard, Gallotia auaritae, isn’t extinct after all. José Antonio Mateo, a reptile expert, only found the one, but he believes there must be a colony within a kilometre of the one he found. In this case, “giant” means 30 cm (one foot) long. Extinct specimens are larger. Twenty-five years ago, they thought Gallotia…