Starmus is a big festival of science and art in Tenerife, with many famous speakers like Stephen Hawking, Brian May and Neil de Grasse Tyson. On Thursday morning I met the VIP visitors from Starmus at the airport. The group included Nobel Prize winners and an astronaut! That’s when I found out that the organisers thought I was going to stay the night at the observatory. I told them two…
From 25th September 2015 to October 9th, the island of La Palma in the Canaries will host Astrofest, a festival of astronomy, with activities for all ages and knowledge levels. There will be an international conference for astrotourism professionals, a spectacular total eclipse of the moon, an international conference for nightscape photographers, and a night photography masterclass. You can find more details and register for all these events at…
Since I got there early, I got a chance to try to photograph the nearest star – our Sun, through a small telescope with a filter which lets through a wavelength called H? (pronounced H alpha). It was tricky. I’m pretty short sighted, and I can’t see well with my glasses squdged up against the viewfinder. For normal stargazing, I take my glasses off and refocus the telescope, but…
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.)
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…
That’s no moon! Actually wait, yes it is. It’s Mimas, Saturn’s 7th biggest moon. The bit that looks like the lasar is the enormous crater Herschel (named for John Herschel, who discovered Mimas in 1789.) Mimas is 396 km in diameter, which is about half the diameter of Earth’s moon. May the 4th be with you!