Tag Archives: la palma

Outreach images with Mercator

Yesterday was my first cloudy observing night this year (after 38 clear nights…), with massive amounts of high clouds over La Palma, so I decided to turn the telescope towards the only object which was still visible (except for the Moon): Jupiter. Luckily the seeing was quite good, so I managed to capture the largest planet of our Solar System in an unexpected detail, with several dark and bright atmospheric features visible besides the large dark bands. (Click on the images to see the original – larger – versions.) There is also an animated version here.

Last year in October I already took an outreach image with the Merope instrument in the morning twilight, but since then I gained much more experience with the processing of FITS images into pretty outreach photos (thanks to the new release and user manual of the FITS Liberator software, and some advanced Photoshop layering techniques), so I re-reduced those exposures of the Eskimo Nebula too, recovering much more detail from both the bright and the dark parts of this planetary nebula. Compare it with the old one!

Outreach is important, and we never take fancy images with Mercator. It would really take only maximum one hour per month to publish something nice a couple of times per year. And most of these images can be taken in twilight, when the science frames can not be taken anymore…

Back at Mercator, now with photography equipment

For my last three observing runs, I preferred to have my racing bike with me on the Canary Islands instead of my photo gear. It would have been especially hard (and heavy) to carry my tripod along when I had to take care of my bike box… But now, at the end of the cycling season (and with quite some kilometers ridden on the Canaries in May and August already), I decided to bring the hardcore photography stuff. Thanks to Jonas now I even have a Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens with me. The view angle is basically the same (though the distortion is very different) as with my standard lens, but the maximum aperture is larger, which enables me to capture more of the faint starlight on the same exposure. Everything you will see in this post was taken with that lens. (Thanks again, Jonas!)

Of course packing was hell again (luckily I had better thing to do on the weekend, like cycling, playing with FIFA 12 – call me a child, I do not care :D), and I did not sleep too much during the night (but then almost 5 more hours on the planes, and this was the first time I have flown with a CRJ900). As my observing run starts on Wednesday only, now I have some time to concentrate on photography. The main goal is to take hundreds (thousands) of images again, and make a new version of my time lapse movie, The Starts of Mercator. And there are always some special things to take additional pictures of :) So lets see what we have here.

This was the first time ever that I have seen lenticular clouds over La Palma. They are usually not seen in good weather, so in astronomical terms, this was a bad sign for the forthcoming night… But not in photographic terms ;)

It was only ‘half moon’ (first quarter) over the Observatory, but it is already very bright. Without the moonlight, you cloud see the Milky Way towards the center of our galaxy on the left side of the picture. Now it is only visible, if you know what to look for… The bright path on the bottom is created by the headlights of someone driving up to the telescopes, and as you can see the dome of the WHT is open in the bottom right corner.

The lenticular cloud stayed for hours there, so I took a picture of it (and a whole time lapse sequence too) with the dorm of the Jacobus Kapteyn telescope in the foreground. Plus you can see the dim, outer part (looking into the anti-center direction) of the Milky Way with constellations like Cassiopeia and Perseus, plus you can easily (if you are/were an amateur astronomer) spot the Andromeda Galaxy in the top right corner.

Jupiter (the brightest ‘star’) and some winter constellations rising behind the INT building right before moonset (that’s why the building looks yellow and instead of white).

Looking towards the North celestistial pole. E pur si muove. It is not a real long exposure shot, but 140 (30 sec exposures) images stacked together from another time lapse sequence. The virtual circles are very nicely preserved thanks to the fisheye lens (compare it to the distortion of a standard lens here.)

Orion rising behind the INT. One hour before the arrival of the storm…

And then, at last but not least, the most special picture of the night. It is – again – part of a time lapse sequence, and you can see red sprites on the top, just below Orion. This is an extremely rarely photographed high altitude lightning, if you do a Google search on it, you won’t find many colour images… And to make it even more special, I was outside – monitoring the weather – when it happened, so I even saw it with my own eyes!!! Just as a red flash thanks to my peripheral vision, but I have seen it! Normally they can be seen from much further and at a lower view angle (and then they look more elongated thanks to the different perspective), so this is really the first image I have ever seen taken from almost below the event. Nice :)

Double observing run: done.

During the last three weeks I spent 17 nights working at the telescope. 11 nights at the 1.2 meter Mercator telescope on La Palma, and 6 nights at the 0.8 meter IAC-80 telescope on Tenerife (and I had one night in between, when I did not have to work). All these nights were clear, and though some were plagued by the Calima (dust from the Sahara blown above the Canaries), I managed to keep observing all the time, except for one hour, when the seeing got so bad, that I could not do anything anymore. It will be really hard to have a better observing run ;) It is not easy to admit that there are much better time-lapse movies than the one I made last year, but the video below really shows how beautiful my workplace is…

I still think that this is the best part of being an astronomer, but of course after so many days it is good to be back in the normal day-night rhythm, and on a lower altitude (almost sea level), where there is more oxygen ;) So after saying good bye to the view from the Observatory (see below – pretty, isn’t it?), I took a taxi down (to 2000 meters lower in elevation) to La Orotava.

I am staying at the Hotel Rural Victoria, and it is perfect. I have a quite big room, free wifi, an LCD TV (on a nice wooden work desk), a huge private terrace overlooking the city and the sea (with my own cacti :D), two big beds, separate bathroom and toilet, etc. And the dinner included in the half pension has three courses with some tidbits in between! Perfect for a tired cyclist, who does not want to look for food after a long day. I hope the breakfast will be as good too! (Update: it is damn good too! I have chosen the best hotel.)

Today I did not do anything special, just assembled my bike (for the 3rd time in three weeks…) while watching the Vuelta (I went on a ‘short’ 1.5-2 hour training on 5 out of 7 afternoons while I was working here on Tenerife, so today was a rest day), walked around the city for an hour (it is really nice, a bit like La Laguna), and got some cookies and chips for later. And a big bottle of water – the most important thing… Now I have 6 days to bike around the island (mostly up and down, not really around), and I made plans for 5. We will see how much I can handle. The rides are shorter (100-130 kilometers), but with a lot of climbing, so it is not at all easy… But the scenery is amazing, so it is definitely worth the struggling ;)

I will keep you updated on the rides! (If I have energy left to blog afterwards… :D)

Daily commute at the ORM

I am back again on La Palma at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) – for the 4th time already. I have 11 nights of work at the Mercator Telescope, then I will fly to Tenerife to continue there with another instrument. As always, I can only say that this island is amazing. Every time I take the taxi from the airport to the observatory, I can not stop staring out the window to look at the landscape. This is the first time I am here during summer, and I have to admit that the temperature is much nicer up here at 2300 meter, than it is in e.g. October. I don’t need my winter coat anymore, and I don’t need to put a kilogram of warm clothes (knee warmers, arm warmers, neck warmer, wind coat, rain jacket, etc.) on when I roll down with the bike on the morning, a simple jacket is enough. So during the day it is typically ~20°C (but it feels much more thanks to the Sun), while on the morning it is around ~15°C. Now again I took my racing bike with me (and I will have a week of cycling after my observing run on Tenerife), so already here I use it every day to commute between the Residencia and the Mercator Telescope.

I need to ride up once before dinner to start the calibrations (~5 PM), then I roll down to eat (~7 PM), and after a small nap I ride up to catch the sunset (which is around 9 PM) and start the observing night. Then I work till the Sun rises, and go down to sleep around 7:30 AM (and sleep from 8 AM to 4-4:30 PM). The ride itself is 2.65 km @ 6.9% with a maximum over 100 meters of 10.3% (a hard 3rd category climb in Tour de France terms), so it is not extremely difficult, but riding above 2000 m makes every climb a bit more challenging (click on the climb-plot and it will be bigger). But it is very good high-altitude training, and 3 times faster than walking! (I don’t even think about driving up with a car, that’s not my thing :D)

On the last afternoon I rode a new personal best up to the telescope, reaching the ‘summit’ in 11m 09s, which corresponds to a VAM of ~1000 Vm/h (yeah, I know it is not really a pro value, but who cares :D)! My previous bests from last October and this May were 12m 05s and 11m 36s, respectively, so the improvement is very clear. Oh, and these were ridden while carrying a backpack… After this record ride, I took the evening ride a bit easier and recorded the scenery (turn the volume down, if you don’t want to listen to my still quite hard breathing…). It is a nice place to work at ;)

Cycling on La Palma – Day 4

On Saturday I again took the day off, just watching the Giro d’Italia, and eating :) Somehow I could also enjoy these rest days, just by really not doing anything. Though these days were a little bit lonely… Anyway, for Sunday I planned an easier ride to finish nicely my cycling holidays on La Palma. Of course when I say easier it is very relative. Because indeed, easier than biking up twice to the Roque de los Muchachos, but compared to that, everything might seem easy. But keep reading, and you will see what I am talking about ;) After getting up at 9:30, I only managed to leave a bit before twelve – partly because it was raining, partly because it was so good to just lay down in the couch :D First, I had the same short climb as on Day 1:

6.59 km @ 5.6% with a maximum over 100 meters of 8.8% (3rd category)

Though I felt like making a good effort, I was a bit slower than on the first day. But I guess it is ok after such a week on the bike. Then after a short near flat section, the big climb (up to El Pilar on LP-203, though I think the road numbering is not the same in real life anymore) of the day started at km 10.41:

14.17 km @ 8.0% with a maximum over 100 meters of 12.9% (HC)

I was not avare of the fact that it will be this hard. I though it would be a 1st category climb, with a much less steep gradient, so I was a bit surprised when I had to face reality. But it was a world class ascent. The worst part was between km 7 and 12 with the following gradients (over 1 km): 9.5, 10.8, 9.3, 9.0 and 10.1 percent. And to make things worse, as I entered the cloud layer around the elevation of approximately 800 meters (so around the beginning of the really steep part), the visibility dropped to 100 meters, and the temperature to 11°C.

At the end of the steep section I have passed another cyclist (who was way older, so not because I would climb like Contador – at least I don’t feel the effect of the Spanish ham too much :D), with whom I had a short chat when he also arrived to the top. It turned out, that he works at the TNG, so it was a day of astronomers on bike ;) He also took a picture of me on the ‘summit’.

It was cold, in the middle of a pine tree forest, with water everywhere. Clearly 100% humidity. So I put on all my warm clothes for the descent (buying that rain jacket was a huge life-saving idea of mine when I ordered some bike stuff on-line the last time), and started rolling down. I could not see anything from the cloud, the visibility was around 50 meters. I had to put on my flashing red rear lights, though cars could not go faster either… And I was freezing like hell (oxymoron warning here). So from almost 1500 meter ASL I went down to almost 800 m ASL, where I turned right onto LP-202 (again, I believe this is not the real designation anymore, but this is written on my map), to climb up to La Cumbrecita:

5.99 km @ 7.8% with a maximum over 100 meters of 12.7% (2nd category)

At the beginning of the road a sign said that the path to the caldera is closed, but I kept going. Luckily when I reached the entrance of the national park, the lady at the barrier said that I can go in (and by the time I was coming back, the barriers were even open). This was the smoothest stretch of road which I have climbed this week, perfect asphalt, though only one and a half lane wide. Perfectly enough for me ;)

At the beginning the road was quite straight, climbing higher and higher on the left side of the valley among the so often seen pine trees of the island. A system of tubes carried down the freshwater from higher parts of the natural reserve along the road, and they were leaking here and there, but because of the tremendously high pressure, these leaks appeared as fountains of several meters high ;) The steepest one kilometer had a gradient of 11%, and that was the point where the road got very curvy.

Unluckily the top was again in the cloud layer, so instead of the amazing view to the inside of the caldera I saw a grey wall and nothing else beyond :(

But it was a very nice climb, so it was worth going up. And the downhill was also very nice on the smooth and quite straight road ;) Then already after leaving the pine tree forest and the national park behind, I had a short period of sunshine when I could look back towards the caldera, but that’s the most I have seen that day.

From here, I still had to climb back to El Pilar, up into the cold clouds, and now even facing the chilly and strong headwind. But it was the last climb.

10.69 km @ 5.9% with a maximum over 100 meters of 10.2% (2nd category)

Luckily this side of the mountain was much easier, though the wind and cold made it a bit miserable. Also the road quality here was a bit below European standards. Unluckily I could not see too much of the numerous volcanic calderas which I have passed here, because all what I could make out was the grey slopes right next to me, but the rest was lost in the mist. I have to admit the situation had a special atmosphere, because the moving (more and less dense) clouds created the illusion of volcanic smoke. Again, on the top it was not more than 11°C, so the descent was freaking cold. And because of the low visibility (50-100 meters all the way down till 750 m ASL) and the wet and steep road, I had to be very careful and break a lot. I did not enjoy it that much… But as soon as I came out of the cloud layer, it was a nice roll all the way to Santa Cruz (where I even had a bit of sunshine to close the day in a sunny mood).

So I finished my last day on La Palma with 82.8 km and 2645 meters of elevation gain (and a pizza of course, as every day this week :D). Yeah, ‘easy day’ :D GPS details here. Luckily I specifically asked for a later connection in Madrid knowing that it is impossible to make it with IBERIA if you only have 55 minutes of transfer time, because now I am sitting in the airport of Tenerife, and we already have a delay of one hour… Yeah IBERIA, damn it!

Thanks for reading, this was the last part :)