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Cycling on La Palma – Day 1

First of all, during my observing run, I rode my bike 25 times up and 25 times down between the ORM Residencia (the place where my room was and the food got served before the work nights), which – at a height of 2300 meters ASL – was a quite good warm-up (climbs of 2.7 km @ 7%) for this week’s cycling. This year, my best time uphills was a half minute better than last autumn! And on average, I was also much faster. Still, I have to face the fact that I am not a very good climber… After my last night at the telescope, I quickly packed everything, and immediately came down to Santa Cruz, to have a day of sleeping and eating (and switching back to a normal day/night rhythm).

So the first day of real holidays – meaning real cycling – was Tuesday, the 17th of May. I only wanted a relatively easy and short ride (keeping my bigger plans for the coming days in mind), so I rode to the south of the island to visit one of the youngest volcanic formations, the Volcán de San Antonio. After a short but really curvy 3rd category climb from Santa Cruz (6.53 km @ 5.4% with a maximum over 100 meters of 9.0%), the rest of the road was only hilly, with slight climb towards Fuencaliente.

The weather was not the best, I rode through low clouds and even got a bit of rain, but with temperatures around 20°C, you can not really complain about it. And anyway, I was prepared for everything ;) I even walked along the rim of the crater (after paying the 3.5 € entrance fee), but I had only my smartphone with me to take pictures with – though for blog-sized images, the quality is still OK, as you can see. It was very interesting, and the view was also great from the top. After the short, but – as I was still wearing cycling shoes – not that comfortable walk, I rode back home, so the day was over after only 67.3 km and an elevation gain of 1058 meters. On-line data from the day can be seen here. Then later that day I was just watching the Giro d’Italia (with English commentary, oh yeah!), and eating a lot to have energy the coming day. Of course I had dinner at my favorite place, the Pizzeria Piccolo, which is just on the other side of the street ;)

To be continued…

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When the Sahara comes over the Canaries

To cut the story short, as I really don’t have time to write endless posts, this is how the Canary Islands looked like from space on the 6th of May,

and this is what the same satellite (MODIS Aqua) saw after they got covered by sand from Africa (image from the 12th of May, credits: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response):

The dust concentration went up from ~0.1-0.5 µgr/m3 to 36 µgr/m3. (The position of the Sun is also a bit different on the two pictures above, lowering the contrast on the bottom one, but believe me, what you see there is mostly sand from the desert.) So this means a hundred times more dust in the atmosphere! And it was really noticeable just by looking around. Everything seemed to be behind a thin layer of yellowish fog… Of course this had a very bad effect on the transparency of the sky, making the observation very difficult during the last two nights. To make things worse, the humidity was also high, and the moonlight is also getting quite disturbing as we are moving closer to full moon. Tonight the humidity is back at ~10% and the dust concentration fall down to 1/10th of its peak value, so life is a bit easier now :)

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My 100th observing night

Tonight is/was my 100th night working at the telescope as an astronomer. My first one was back in Hungary as a master student on the 28th of November in 2005 at the 1 meter RCC telescope of the Konkoly Observatory. I spent a sum of 64 nights with this beautiful Zeiss instrument on Piszkéstető, unluckily on 17 of these I was only monitoring the clouds… (Luckily I really like meteorology.) Besides collecting data for my Master’s Thesis I also participated in international campaigns (like the Whole Earth Telescope project). I really enjoyed these runs, because it was the first time I was allowed to work with professional equipment, and also because the telescope is situated in the highest mountains of Hungary, and the scenery was really nice up there. The forest was colorful, in clear weather you could see the lights and hills of Budapest, or even the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. And in winter, there was a lot of snow, or the mountaintops were just above the fog and smog layer – which is very common this time of the year in the Carpathian basin…

Then after I started my PhD in Belgium I had two runs (and now I have the third, so 30 nights so far and only 2 of these was completely unsuitable for observations) at our Institute’s 1.2 meter Mercator Telescope here on La Palma, and one run (6 nights, but 3 with bad weather – which was really unusual for that season) with the IAC-80 on Tenerife. As I am pretty much in love with these rocky and deserted mountain landscapes, I think I don’t really need to stress on how much I like to spend my time here on the Canary Islands :) I became an astronomer because I wanted to work with (these) telescopes. That’s what I really enjoy in this profession. And probably that’s what I will try to do after my PhD as a support astronomer somewhere… But who knows what future holds ;)

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April

Again a full mont passed since I posted anything here. I do not have the same motivation as before (to write regularly), but still, I would like to remember what happened with me, and my – built in – memory is not sufficient to handle all the information. So I write a post every month – at least. Now I am flying over Spain towards La Palma, with the clouds below, so I have time again :) Pictures are slightly randomly spread over this time. Figure out what is what ;)

First of all, this month, I have biked a lot. And when I say a lot, I really mean it. If I look at my calendar on Garmin Connect, it is full of rides. There were times when I rode too much, I could tell it from the way my legs denied to move as fast as my mind requested them to do. So with all the KUL trainings, the Brabantse Pijl (the sportive version, not the Race – which was the first out of the four wins for Gilbert early in the season, making him the ‘Armstrong of the spring classics’ this year), the first ever AstroTeam ride (with colleagues), the usual lonely rides to Mechelen, and a really good day to the citadel of Namur, I rode 885.44 kilometres (spent 29h 28m 08 s in the saddle, and burned ~25000 Calories), which made this April my best month on the racing bike ever. And I could have done more if I wanted, but there are other things in life, not just cycling. (Yeah, shocking statement, I know :D) But I enjoy every second on the road. I really fly on the bike :)

Work is OK, but a bit slow. Sometimes I have my ideas but I don’t feel like woking them out. I know the road which leads to the solution, but I don’t want to walk along it. And then it is sometimes really hard to force myself to stay concentrated on the details… But after Easter, we had a four day workshop at the Institute on binary stars and the Kepler satellite, and it was really good, I have learned a lot of useful and new stuff, which I will be able to use probably very soon.

Thanks to the workshop, I have met some old friends, and we had great dinners all week long. Just to mention one from the many, I had the best salmon of my life in the Lodge in Heverlee. Also, I served as the official photographer of the event, taking not just a series of static, but a full HD group ‘picture’ too ;) Everyone liked the idea – you can check it out for yourself on YouTube.

Just like last year, my mother came for a visit – and brought cake, wine, and Túró Rudi with herself :) Everyone asks the same question, so I have to make it clear, that I would have been happy to have her around even without these nice add-ons ;) But I would be a terrible liar if I were to deny that this way it was even better :D We had a nice weekend together, and this time the weather was also fine. In general, the weather in April was almost unbelievably sunny, warm and dry. Belgium is not a rainy place at all, the two years I have spent here really forces me to draw this conclusion.

And at last, but definitely not least, I spent three great days with Elise, whom I got to know last month in the Stuk. First, on the 20th after a morning meeting with my supervisor, I went to Antwerpen, where she gave me a tour around the city, but avoiding all the shopping streets :)

This really improved my opinion about the city a lot! Then on the last day of April, we went to Den Haag to the Netherlands – again for a picturesque city trip. It was the Queen’s birthday, so the abundance of people dressed in orange was extremely high.

We took quite a large amount of pictures too! Oh, and just to mention one special thing, I sat in the drivers seat of a tram – which we later took to just go around the city. And we ate delicious bread and cheese :) Then, to close the day we went back to Antwerpen to a nice Italian restaurant, where they served the best pizza of the city.

Finally – when I was almost on the train back to Leuven (I have already filled out my Rail Pass for the trip), we decided to have another trip on the following day (and be surprised, I was happy to cancel my cycling plans without any doubt), as the ticket inspectors were not too active on the trains that day (it might have something to do with the fact that crowd dressed in orange were blocking the aisle…), and our weekend ticket to the Netherlands stayed untouched ;) So I slept on the couch at Elise’s place (though I almost had to fight for it with her cat :D), then after a delicious breakfast (what a smoothie she made!), we left to Rotterdam.

I have seen some parts of the city when I was there last year to photograph the Tour de France and I already liked it a lot, but now it was even better. We walked around a much bigger area (so I have seen things a have not seen before), had an amazing clear and sunny – but not too warm – weather (perfect to lie or sit down on a square or at the river banks and just enjoy being there), and – the most important of all – I was not alone.

I really like the city, it is modern (has amazing architecture) but with a lot of green, and some well preserved and integrated older parts too… This was my best weekend for quite a long time. (We are just leaving the coast of the continental Europe behind while I am writing these words.) I really enjoyed taking pictures and talking with Elise, and then checking out our images on the trains back to Belgium. We had a wonderful time.

I missed the cheerful atmosphere a lot when I finally went home to Leuven, especially because I had to spend the next day with preparing and packing for La Palma, but I was very happy about the time we spent together. And for a side note, I really hate packing. And even though I really wanted to finish in time now, it was 2 AM when I finally closed my bike box. I have no idea how can I pack for such a long time… And now comes the funny part of the story. As usual, I have asked for a cab for the morning (5:15) from the same taxi company I always use, but it did not show up… I was waiting with my 60 kilograms of luggage in front of the house, and nothing… I tried to call them, but there was only voicemail. As I did not know any other companies, and it was pretty much too early to try to phone someone for help, I walked (rushed/struggled) to the station with all my stuff (I think I was quite a sight on the streets of Leuven – even for people who are used to see students travel with their suitcases every Friday and Sunday evening – with my backpack in front, the huge – and I am not kidding here – North Face XL travel duffel on my back, and pulling the bike box next to me – thank God it has wheels…), and took a taxi there. Luckily I was still in time, so if everything goes well, I will land on La Palma in one and a half hour :) Now it is two weeks of work and a week of holiday (cycling up and down) on the Canaries. This is the part of my job I like the most ;)

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