Life has been happening too fast to blog about. It’s nearly all good things but I’ve struggled to keep up. For example, on Wednesday I abandoned a Nobel Prize winner in a broken down car. Yes really. The Canarian Astrophysics Institute hosted a big partical physics conference on the island, all about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is an instrument on the ISS. (It measures antimatter in cosmic rays, with…
Total Lunar Eclipse April 15th 2014, as seen from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter. SkyCenter.Arizona.edu In the early hours of September 28th the moon will plunge into the Earth’s shadow and turn blood red. It’s a perfectly normal event, produced by the combined orbits of the earth and moon and the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere bending the sunlight like a lens, but it’s dramatic and spooky, and if you didn’t…
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…
Last night was the famous sardine’s funeral in Los Sauces. As usual, there were lots of amazing costumes: some ingenious, some cheap and cheerful, some extravagant, many humourous. It’s traditional to serve fried sardines, and very tasty they are too. One group brought along this amazing fairy tale coach. They were inviting children to have their photo taken in it. Being a…
Fuencaliente means “Hot Spring”. The southernmost municipality takes its name from the hot spring which seeped out into pools on Echentive beach. It was famous for curing all kinds of sickness, including leprosy and syphilis, so Fuencaliente used to attract sick people from all over Europe and even South America. That’s the setting for “A Star in the Water”, one of the stories in “The Seer’s Stone“. And then Volcan…
Carnival is starting! Here are some photos from the schools’ procession in San Pedro (Breña Alta) this evening.