Yesterday afternoon I should have bashed on with the Starlight Guide project and housework. Instead I took a couple of hours off and met my friend in Los Tilos. The bar there is popular with small birds (a kind of chaffinch, I think) and I couldn’t resist trying to get a photo. There was a catch, of course. Flexible though my new compact is, there’s a short delay between pressing…
The last practical activity on the Starlight Guide course was a trip to the observatory at the Roque de los Muchachos. The bus left Santa Cruz at 2:30 pm, and when we arrived we left our stuff in the dormitories that I didn’t even know they had up there (they converted one of the houses some time ago for groups like ours, four bunks to a room, bathroom shared between…
Now you can hear my story, “The Dodo Dragon” as a free podcast fromThe Way of the Buffalo read by R. E. Chambliss.
Astronomy Picture of the Day is a great site. And yesterday they had a fantastic time lapse shot in the Teide national park in Tenerife.http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110516.htmlBut the coolest bit of all is that Daniel Lopez, who shot this video, will be giving a talk to us trainee Starlight Guides on Friday night. Sickening, aren’t I?
I was supposed to do the volcanoes walk on Saturday night as part of my Starlight Guide course. I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s 20 km, and starts with a 500m climb, which is obviously not ideal for a podgy writer with a bad case of Writer’s Bottom. On the other hand, it’s a famously beautiful walk, and I’ve always wanted to do it someday….
Here’s what was supposed to happen:I was supposed to meet a group of 52 kids plus some adults at the observatory heliport at 9:45, give them a quick general talk about the observatory there, then take them up to the Isaac Newton Telescope, split the group in two, and take 26 kids+a few adults into the telescope at a time, and finish by 12:00 Here’s what actually happened:The kids’ bus…