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Winter School on Tenerife – 2nd week

Ok, so back to Monday. What happened on Monday (22nd of November)? I guess just the usual lectures, as I can not remember anything special. Then on Tuesday, we had to present our poster “on the stage”, using a short PDF-presentation. Luckily I prepared the PDF already on the morning, because the afternoon turned out to be quite “unlucky” for my computer. As usual, I was listening to the lecture with my MacBook in front of me (for taking notes, following the talk, and – sometimes – checking e-mail…), and – as always – I had my drink right next to it. This was the only day, when I was drinking something else than water, as I had a full bottle of orange Gatorade left unopened from the climb on the weekend. So at a point during the afternoon session, I refilled my (wine) glass, and then while moving it back to the table, I hit the bottom of the glass to the table, which resulted in the glass flipping over and covering the full keyboard of my MacBook with ~2 dl of sticky orange juice… At this moment, everyone in the room became silent or said “uhhh :S”, then – after being frozen for one second due to the shock – I quickly turned off the computer and disconnected the power adapter, then turned the MacBook to its side, and tried to get off (blow off) the liquid stuff as fast as I could. After the monitor unexpectedly turned on and started to flicker, I also took out the battery… From this point, I could not do anything else, just let it dry, hoping that I would be able to turn it on after a while… Surprisingly, I handled the situation quite well… I thought there was no reason to freak out, as it would not solve anything anyway. I stayed calm and did not think about it at all :) So the presentation went very well on the evening.

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On Wednesday we had a guided bus-tour to the Teide National Park and the Observatorio del Teide. First we drove up (with some photo-breaks) to the Residencia of the Observatory where we had small sandwiches and drinks, then we went to the Visitors’ Center to learn about the history, flora, and fauna of the area.

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After a walk around in their botanic garden, we continued to the magnificent rock formations of the National Park, where we had a half hour to look around and take pictures. We took a lot :) Then we returned to the Observatory to visit the OGS (Optical Ground Station) – which has the same 1 meter Zeiss RCC telescope as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on Piszkéstető (compare the one on Tenerife with the Hungarian) -, the THEMIS Solar Telescope, and the container of the GONG Network.

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At sunset, we saw the same atmospheric phenomenon which I have already seen when I was observing (2nd picture in the linked post) with the IAC-80 in September, but now as the Sun went down at the other side of the Teide, the dark ray had a different direction. I had an intense discussion with one of the professors about the origin and nature of this phenomenon, and it took me quite a lot of time, to prove my theory. (Then on the next morning I realised that I was not completely right, but my renewed theory of “mountain shadow + anticrepuscular ray formed by the Teide” was accepted by both of us immediately.)

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To close the day, we had a mind-blowing dinner halfway down from the mountain in La Esperanza. The amount of meat was unbelievable, I asked for chicken, and I got a half chicken. I mean, half of everything. It was huge. The professor from Texas told that the steak was huge even for him ;D And it was also delicious, not just a lot. We had no difficulties with falling asleep that evening… (There is also a short video about this day here.)

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On Thursday, we had a computer session in the University of La Laguna (ULL), but – for some unknown reasons – we quickly managed to crash the network, which made things a bit more complicated :) Still, by the end of the 4 hour session, we – at least my group – managed to finish almost all the exercises. On the evening, we had the official closing dinner, in a fancy restaurant in the Orotava Valley, somewhere above Puerto de la Cruz. It was very nice. Friday was the last day with lectures, then on the evening we went out for a traditional dinner to a small restaurant which was run by a family. We ate several different meals (I even tasted the octopus…), drank a lot of wine, and still we only payed 8 € per person… It was unbelievable. On Saturday, we left Tenerife in 27°C, but I think it will not surprise anyone anymore, that we did not make it back to Belgium before Sunday noon. (We spent the night in a 4 star hotel next to the airport in Madrid, thanks to the Spanish air traffic controllers and payed by IBERIA). But when we arrived, than it was -1°C… Quite a different climate back in Europe…

It was a very nice winter school, I am happy that we decided to attend!

Sunrise on the Pico del Teide [3718 m]

It was not my idea. I thought that this time I would finally manage to travel to the Canary Islands without winter clothes, gloves, caps, warm hiking boots, etc. But on the last week before leaving to the Winter School, I got an e-mail from Ádám, who works at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest (Hungary), that he would really like to climb the Teide, but he needs someone to join… And of course I could not say no to such an idea :) So I even packed in my hiking sticks (the ones I bought in Andorra) along with my full hiking equipment (GPS, headlamp, etc.). This probably meant an extra 3 kilograms at least… There was only one problem at the beginning: the permit. Because you can not just walk up to the very top of Spain, you need a permit for it. As the volcano lies in a National Park, they want to protect the caldera from erosion by not letting up all the thousands of tourists, who take the cable car all the way up till 3550 meter ASL. The cable car runs from 9 AM till 4 PM, and you can apply for a permit online for these hours. Also, if you sleep in the Altavista refuge (at 3270 m ASL), then you can go and climb the peak – if you leave the restricted part before 9 AM – with a stamped document which proves your previous stay in the hut. Now, to make it complicated, we planned to make the climb during the night, but without sleeping on the mountain, so it was not clear how to proceed. I tried to get information from the National Park (via e-mail), but with no success. We had no 100% secure information on Saturday morning, less than a day before the planned ascent, so as a last idea, we went to the info point of La Laguna, where we asked the lady – who gave us the guided tour in the city an hour earlier :) – to find out what do we need to do. It turned out (after she spoke with someone and mentioned that two astrophysicists wants to climb the peak ;D), that we can go without a permit, if we leave the peak before 9 AM. We were really happy about this!

We spent the rest of the day with shopping (food and drinks for the climb), and – as I already told about it yesterday – with a scenic ride through the Anaga Mountains. Then Ádám went to sleep early (he is not crazy, I should have done the same, but you know, I am crazy :D), and I went for dinner (and had one of the best pizzas of my life in a very nice restaurant). My original plan was to sleep at least three hours, but at the end, I only managed 40 minutes… So you can imagine how painful it was to get out of the bed at 1 AM… So after a long and quiet drive to the National Park, we parked the car in the parking place at 2350 m ASL at 2:15, and started the hike at 2:30 (five hours before Sunrise), under the light of the magnificent full Moon.

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It was so bright, we could have walked all the way up without headlamps. The route was very easy during the first 4.5 kilometers, meandering through volcanic ash, sand, and rock formations, and the “real thing” started after this part, somewhere at 2750 m ASL. Then the next 3.5 km brought more than 800 meter of elevation gain, on a steep, but not at all technically difficult path (no use of hands needed) through the frozen lava-flows of the Teide. The only difficulty was the less and less air to breath, so we became quite slow above 3000 meter. Luckily, we had a lot of time, so there was no reason to rush. Then there was a ~700 meter long almost flat section leading to the mountain station of the cable car at 3550 meter ASL, where the restricted path started towards the peak. Of course at this hour there was no one at the checkpoint asking for permits… The last half kilometer with more than 150 meter of elevation gain was really slow, and steep. The Moon was (still) surrounded by a full halo ring, and we started to smell the sulfur gases of the volcano. We arrived at the very top at 6:35. We were not the first ones to arrive, but far not the last ones either. And we were the only ones who started from the parking place, and not from the refuge… It was very cold on the peak (which is the highest side along the rim of the crater), somewhere around -5°C with strong winds, so it felt like -20°C…

We took cover between the rocks, but it was far from perfect. It was so cold, that I had to put on another top layer (a thermal ski underwear), but to do so, first I had to get rid of everything from my upper body except the my T-shirt… (For the best effect, I should have put on the ski thing as the very bottom layer, but getting of the T-shirts was really not an option at that moment.) Man, the 10 seconds I had to stand there like that was terrible. By the time I was finished with this operation, I really did not feel the end of my fingers (as I had to get my gloves off too, to be able to change clothes). Luckily with everything back on, the situation started to feel much more comfortable.

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At this point, the dawn was already underway, coloring the sky above the eastern horizon with shades of blue, yellow, orange and red. After waiting three quarters of an hour, the Sun started to rise, casting the shadow of the mountain towards the island of La Palma.

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As the Sun climbed higher on the sky, the triangular shadow became more prominent, and covered the sea between Tenerife and La Palma. The other hikers left the harsh peak as fast as they could after they all made their pictures, but we stayed much longer.

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It was so beautiful, that I wish we could have stayed even longer. And – to say something positive about the freezing cold wind -, finally the Hungarian flag flew as a flag always should! It was also very interesting to see the gases coming up from the crater…

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At the end, we started the descent after one hour and 15 minutes on the peak, and we left the restricted path behind 30 minutes before the deadline.

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The walk down felt very long and tiring, but now – thanks to the daylight – we could at least see the surroundings too :)

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The view was of course magnificent, with the whole (visible) world below us. I especially like the reflection of low clouds on the mirror of the sea…

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The last kilometers seemed like an endless walk in the desert, it was hot, dry, and sand all over the place.

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We arrived back to the car 9 hours and 30 minutes after we started the climb. I was so tired (after 1400 meters of elevation gain, several hours spent above 3000 meter, and basically no sleep for 30 hours), that I did not manage to stay awake while Ádám drove us back to the Hotel. Luckily he did :)

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It was a wonderful climb, highly recommended! (GPS details here.)

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Winter School on Tenerife – 1st week

I am not really in the mood of bloggin’ these days, but I don’t want to forget everything (and I still enjoy looking back at old posts, and I want to look back to these things later on), so I will make myself write something. It is just difficult to sit down and start writing, when you have so many other things to do. Anyway, let’s do it :) So Steven and I left Leuven at 5 AM on a rainy and cold Saturday morning (13th of November), with the hope that we would be on Tenerife already that afternoon, one day before the start of the winter school. This plan failed already before take-off, as the Spanish air-traffic controllers decided to screw with thousands of travelers, for a higher salary and better work-conditions (I guess). And only the pilot was brave enough to tell us the truth, because on the airports, the official explanation was bad weather (which was clearly not the case in Madrid). So we had to wait two hours at the gate (I had to buy a book to read – and for your information, the reading failed because I did not sleep anything on the previous night), one hour in the airplane but still on the tarmac, before we finally took off. It was granted at that point, that we would miss our connection in the Spanish capital, but what really came after we landed in Madrid, was beyond our wildest expectations.

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We had to queue for more than three hours to exchange our tickets (meanwhile watching two other planes leaving to Tenerife), because there were only 3 people behind the IBERIA information desk, dealing with half of all the delayed people on the whole terminal… At the end, we got a ticket for the following morning, and we were taken to a hotel in the outskirts of Madrid… Strangely enough, the dinner was in an Asian restaurant. So on the next morning we had to get up at 6 AM, and catch the flight after a quick breakfast in the Starbucks of the airport. I do not know if only because of the delays, but our plane was an Airbus A340-600, the second biggest plane of the Airbus company (following the new A380), so I was happy :) It even had a tail-cam broadcasting live from the top of the tail ;) So at the end, we arrived to our hotel in La Laguna 37 hours after we left Leuven. Still in time for the welcome drinks. We even managed to get Belgian beers in a pub during the evening, so we knew we were safe from then on.

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The school part of the XXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics was – most of the time – interesting, you can find all the presentations on-line, if you need to know more, but I will not write about this here. For me, the school was a very good opportunity to get to know a lot of young researchers and professors from the field. As we were together for two weeks, it was not a hard task. So from now on, I will cover only the social events, not the science.

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On Monday evening, we visited a local wine cellar, and after a walk through the cellar and the production area, we had a dinner there. It supposed to be a wine tasting event with some food, but it turned out to be a dinner, with one red and white wine only… On Tuesday, we went to the IAC headquarters. I do not really have anything to say about that, except that the big engineering room was cool. The buffet dinner was not (but this is the only negative thing I can say about the IAC).

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Wednesday was lecture-free (we had four 90 min lectures every “workday” – except Wednesdays), but we had to get up early, because we flew to La Palma to visit the Observatory there. Flying such short-distances with these small planes is like taking the bus. Our schedule was very tight, so we did not have too much time at different points, but at least we saw a lot.

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We visited the following telescopes: MAGIC, GTC (finally, I made it – yes, this is a reference to the afternoon, when I overslept the visit in October), WHT, and the TNG (follow the links for videos!), plus we had lunch and coffee at the Residencia, and 15 minutes at the Roque de Los Muchachos. We had perfect weather (with cool cycling sunglasses on :D), so the road up and down was also really nice (for those who did not sleep in the bus al the time :D). Before catching our flight back, we had 20 (!) minutes to walk around Santa Cruz. Did I already mention, that we had a tight schedule? :D

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Thursday and Friday was nothing special (lectures – oh, and I got a very positive referee report on my submitted paper!), then on Saturday after a guided tour around the center of La Laguna (video here) we rode through the beautiful Anaga Mountains in the Northeastern part of Tenerife (video here), and we went shopping for the next day, which I will cover in my next post soon :)

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To be continued…

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Asteroseismology

Sorry for no posts recently, but I am very busy. To fill in the gap, please watch the presentation below (given by my supervisor) if you are still not familiar with the field of my research. I will write in detail about the past two weeks (the IAC Winter School) as soon as I can. Stay tuned, and check out the pictures in the meantime.

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Holidays in Santa Cruz – 2.

After a restful day, I went cycling again. This time I wanted to ride to the north along the eastern coast of the island, then turn to the west, and climb the highest peak of La Palma from the northwestern direction. I knew it would be hard (with more than 120 km and three and a half kilometer of elevation gain, on the steepest roads of the island), but we need challenges in life :) I had my breakfast sitting at the open window (that’s something I will miss in Leuven, but finally I will have my chocolate, fries, and beer ;D) and watching the sunrise over the calm see towards the island of Tenerife. I had some difficulties inserting my contact lenses (everything is great about lenses, but I don’t like this part), so it was already half past 9 by the time I managed to leave the apartment.

The first 60.9 km was like a roller-coaster ride, with amazing views to the see, the steep cliffs and narrow valleys. In general, there were three longer climbs before the real thing started, but if you are interested in the details, click here to see the GPS data of the day. Words are not enough to describe the beauty of the island, I have seen the paradise here. Really, there were times, when I could see a rainbow in the distance as there were small showers hanging over the see, and imagine the whole scene over green slopes and curvy mountain roads…

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The road usually went around the ridges, but sometimes there were tunnels also. I knew this would happen, so I put my rear light on already at the beginning, and just turned it on when I saw a tunnel approaching. But at the last and longest one, I went in as usual, but then it turned out that there is absolutely no lighting inside, and as the end was not visible from the first hundreds of meters, it became completely dark very soon. Luckily, for safety reasons, I also put my headlamp in my backpack, so I stopped in the darkness, and put it on… But it was really shocking to roll in with 40 km/h and then realize that the road disappears in the darkness :D There were also some sections, where one lane was closed due to road-works, and the traffic was controlled by traffic-lights, so I had to wait sometimes several minutes to get a green sign (and I usually managed to pass the section before the other direction got the green).

So after a bit more than 60 km and an elevation gain of two kilometers, I arrived to the start of the climb at an elevation of 940 meter ASL. From here, it took 19.4 km to climb 1485 meter to the Roque de los Muchachos, which gives an average slope steepness of 7.7%, making this the most difficult climb I ever had (maybe even without taking into account the two kilometers of elevation gain already in my legs at the beginning of the big climb). The first kilometers were quite OK till the point where I had to turn to the TF-4 road from the TF-1 (which I was following from Santa Cruz), then came the brutal section. Really, it did hurt. In 1.8 km I rode up 200 meters, which translates to an average steepness of 11.1%, and also a nice amount of lactate in your legs ;) But this is only the average, there was a curve-combination (looking down you could see three two more “levels” of the road below the one you were riding on), where it went up to 15% for quite a long section. (There were two buses coming down, and the drivers were waving and smiling when they saw me – but this was the case with most of the cars I met on the way up, which felt really good.) Of course the forest and the scenery was amazing, the sky was deep blue (with no clouds on this side of the mountain), but I was really tired to take pictures, I think I just wanted to concentrate on the climb itself.

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Halfway up the mountain, I really got fed up with the energy bars and gels (which I ate ate every stop after every 250 m of elevation gain), so I will be happy not to eat them for a while now, as the outdoor cycling season is probably over for this year (based on the temperatures I have seen for Belgium). Now – not like two days before – I arrived to the area of the Observatory in sunshine, so there was no need of warmer clothes before reaching the summit. I was extremely happy when I finally arrived at the peak, and I don’t want to deny that it felt very good that quite a few people gave their congratulations when they saw me :) Quickly I asked for a photo, then (after all these formalities) I sat down and took a bit of a rest. (But first I put on the knee and arm warmers, the wind west and the neck warmer, because the wind was cold.)

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I already knew the way down from two days earlier, but it was still a challenge with the numerous steep curves. Luckily the road was less wet now (though it was still not cloudless on this side of the mountain), and as I did not receive another tropical rain-shower as a present from mother nature this time, I hade really nice views after I came out of the cloud layer. It was a really well spent day.

After taking a shower, I slept a bit (yeah, I was tired as hell) before I went for my usual dinner. You coud really tell that the waiter was really happy to see me again – as I had my dinner at the same small pizzeria every evening (I already had my favorite spot). They served great pizza (though not the best I ever had, but close to it), and I liked the atmosphere of the place. Moreover, I usually payed only 10 € for everything with tip included, which is at least 50% more in Leuven. But this was also true for the supermarket, I was always surprised how cheep my purchases were.

This morning (after the usual breakfast wit the view to the sunrise over the sea… – boring :D) I packed in everything (now I am a really professional bike disassembler and packer), the took the taxi to the airport, and now I am flying over Portugal on the way to Madrid. Hopefully everything will be fine and I (and also my luggage) will arrive around 10 PM to Brussels, so I might be in Leuven still before midnight. If I manage to post this post then you know I am fine (and if not, then this sentence does not make any sense, but hope for the best :D).

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