Manel Soria, who gave a talk on night photography at FotoNature 2012 now has amazing photos of La Palma on his website at www.frikosal.net The photo above was taken in the observatory, looking north. From left to right you can see the empty dome of the Swedish 60 cm telescope, MAGIC II (on the horizon, some distance below), the Superwasp Follow-up Telescope (closer), the Liverpool telescope (peeking from behind the ridge),…
Most of La Palma has good weather nearly all year. But the observatory is up at 2400 m (almost 8,000 ft) and occasionally in winter dramatic storms come howling in, dump half a metre of snow overnight, and disappear almost as fast as they came. If you’re planning a trip to the observatory between November and March, be sure to check the road conditions before you leave. You can…
The big telescopes at the observatory at the Roque de Los Muchachos mostly use mirrors rather than lenses. Domestic mirrors have the aluminium behind glass to protect it, but astronomical mirrors have the aluminium on top. This gives the best image, but it also means that the aluminium slowly spoils, and has to be replaced every three years or so. This is not a simple operation. The aluminium layer is…
GranTeCan is the biggest optical telescope in the world, and it’s hard to convey the sheer size of it in a photograph. The telescope itself weighs 485 tonnes. You could fit an tennis court inside the dome, and the top of the dome is 41 m above the ground. But you can’t see any of that in a photograph. Luckily for me, the engineers did some maintenance on the massive…
Putting the Galileo’s mirror onto the carrying case, which is on the lorry. I didn’t have any guiding work yesterday, but I drove up the mountain anyway. I wanted to get photos of people moving the main mirror from the Galileo to the Herschel telescope for realuminizing. They only do this once every three years, so I was keen not to miss it. That mirror weighs about 6 tonnes, and…
Me and the Superwasp follow-up telescope. Last night I went up to the Roque to photograph telescopes at sunset. The time rather snuck up on me, so I left in a hurry and a bad mood, worried that I’d drive up (200 hairpin bends and about 75 minutes each way) and not get any photos after all. As it turned out, I got arrived with about five minutes to spare….