One of the fun things about Thursday’s job was meeting Luis Alberto Hernando. Not only was he the favourite to win this year (which he did in an amazing 6:52:39), but he’s also my kind of bonkers. (For those of you who don’t know Spanish, I’m translating myself into Spanish, and then he’s saying the same thing without the Mad Scientist accent. Very seriously.)
Today 11 of the Transvulcania runners visited the observatory, together with about 20 journalists. Lucky me, I got the job of being their guide. So I showed them around GTC and the MAGIC. It felt a bit odd, because the runners were interested in the telescopes, but the photographers were largely interested in the runners. Well, it’s their job, obviously: they weren’t there for me or the telescopes. But at the end,…
I had too many blogs. There was the La Palma blog, and the personal blog with the writing stuff, and one about astronomy and one about El Hierro. Plus there was my bookshop and my main site (or at least it used to be my main site, but it was very neglected and old-fashioned.) All this took up far too much of my time and interfered with writing. So I…
It’s Fiesta de la Cruz again. I was really busy this year, so I just went for a quick look at Calle Rodriguez Lopez, the street in Santa Cruz where they have all the mayos. As always, it was fun. This year they had a theme of jobs and professions.
The Roque de Los Muchachos is a spectacular place to watch the sunset. For one thing, you’re usually above the clouds (which is one reason the observatory is there.) In fact, sometimes the clouds are so much lower than the Roque that the sun sets well below you. This means that your shadow on a wall is taller than you, and the shadows of your legs go on forever….
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is negotiating with the IAC to site more Cherenkov telescopes on La Palma. It’s not guarenteed that they’ll come here, but it’s highly likely. What is certain is that they’re going to build a prototype here. So what’s a Cherenkov telescope? The oversimplification is that it’s a telescope to look at gamma rays instead of visible light. For more detail, see this article on…