La Palma is home to one of the three most important astronomical observatories in the world. (The other two are Hawaii and the Atacama desert in Chile.) The observatory sits at the top of the island, at the Roque de los Muchachos. It’s a fascinating place to visit, but it’s not normally open to tourists – they’re too busy doing science. However, the IAC who run the site are organising…
In all my 11 years of working at the Roque as a software engineer, I never visited the Nordic Optical Telescope. We used to joke that it was NOT one of ours. And in two years of tour guiding up there, I never went in either. It was NOT on my programme. But now I’m writing an e-book about the observatory, and it’s NOT a good idea to write about…
Oddly enough, nobody invited me to meet the king of Spain at the official inauguration of GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio Canario or Big Canarian Telescope) so I had to watch it on the TV. I learned something new. The main mirror is accurate to 15 nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre). So if you scaled up the mirror to 10,400 km (and the radius of the Earth is…
This is GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio Canario / Big Canarian Telescope) on the Roque de los Muchachos observatory in La Palma. It will be inaugurated on July 24th. The king and queen of Spain are coming, and there are rumours that Dr. Brian May is coming too. The telescope and its first two instruments cost €105 million: 90% of this came from Spain, 5% from Mexico, and 5% from the University…
GranTeCan, the huge new Spanish telescope La Palma is home to one of the three most important astronomical observatories in the world. (The other two are Hawaii and the Atacama desert in Chile.) The observatory sits at the top of the island, at the Roque de los Muchachos. It’s a fascinating place to visit, but it’s not normally open to tourists – they’re too busy doing science. You can visit…
The road from Santa Cruz to the Roque is blocked by snow at least until midday tomorrow. It’s open on the Garafía side, but only to 4-wheel drive vehicles. Years ago, when I was on duty overnight at the Roque in winter, it was part of my job to check the road in the morning to see whether or not it was safe for cars to come up to site….