Star Finders

M100 (NGC 4321), a barred galaxy in the Virgo cluster

There's a really simple reason why the Royal Greenwich Observatory moved their telescopes here. It's one of the three best places in the world for astronomy.

A modern telescope could see the equivalent of a candle on the moon, so obviously they want to be well away from city lights. Even more obviously, they want to be somewhere that doesn't get many cloudy nights.

Much less obviously, they want to be somewhere the stars don't twinkle. This happens when the air's turbulent. It's pretty, but it really messes up your view.

There are three places in the world which are great on all three counts, and La Palma is one of them. (The other two are the peak of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the Atacama Desert in Chile.)

The problem is to keep it that way.

When the observatory moved here, they asked for, and got, an agreement to limit things like street lights. Los Llanos has a street with lamps which remind me of 1950's hairdryers - the sort that go all around your head.

Recently the island government committed to spending over a million euros to update the streetlights to reduce the light pollution even further.

The result of all this is that La Palma is a great place for amateur astronomers, too. Even in a resort, people notice how many more stars you see here, compared to almost any English town or city. Here's another picture, this time of M51, taken by my friends in Franceses with an 80mm amateur telescope on their first night's astronomy since they moved here. Of course there's a lot of skill involved too. But they used to live in Streatham, and no amount of skill would produce that kind of result there.

If you want to recognise the constellations, the best solution is something called a planisphere. This is two special circles of plastic fastened at the centre. Twirl them until the date on one lines up with the time on the other, and you get a picture of the night sky for the right time, date, and position on the planet. (In fact you want to set the time for an hour later than GMT because clocks on La Palma are set just one hour behind Madrid, which leaves us in the same time zone as
London, but a long way west.)

If you bring a UK planisphere with you, everything will be shifted and it won't show the southern stars at all.

Perhaps surprisingly, the best one for the Canaries is titled "Hawaii, Mexico, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan." This is because you have to buy one for the correct latitude (your distance north or south of the equator) but the longitude (east-west distance from London) doesn't matter, because you compensate for that when you set the time. Amazon.co.uk sells normally sells them for £6.99 (at left), although the last time I looked they only had a used one, (and it was more expensive). If you want a UK planisphere, it's slightly cheaper (at right).

Amazon.com also sell them. The one for La Palma is $13.87 (below)
Philips Planisphere from Amazon.com


Happy stargazing!

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Moon Exhibition in Santa Cruz de la Palma

Photo: Nick Smith, taken on August 14th at the Roque de los Muchachos


In honour of the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, and the International Year of Astronomy, the observatory is hosting an exhibition about the moon. It covers the history of lunar observations from the first time Galileo pointed his telescope at it in 1609 to the present. You don't have to read Spanish to appreciate the gorgeous photos from the telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos, or the videos and interactive maps of the moon.

The opening party is on Saturday 28th November at noon. The classic rock group, Manifold, will play songs about the moon, and there will be free nibbles.

That night at 8pm there'll be telescopes in the main courtyard of the San Francisco convent so you can see the moon up close and personal. Best of all, the Italians are bringing a replica of Galileo's telescope from 400 years ago.

and for those that do understand Spanish, on Friday 4th December at 8pm, Dr. Romano Corradi of the Grantecan will give a talk on the moon.

And it's all free!

The exhibition is in Palacio Salazar, on the main street (Calle O'Daly) of Santa Cruz de la Palma, open from 10 am to 8pm. Monday, 30th November - Friday, 4th December.

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Where to find the Star Parties

Here's a Google map with the locations of the two star parties, at the top and bottom.

View La Palma Island in a larger map
Click on one of the blue map pins for details.

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Stargazing in aid of Fire Victims

Wednesday night (August 12th) should be the best night of the year to see shooting stars. Shooting stars happen when the Earth passes through a cloud of dust left behind by a comet's tail. To celebrate, the amateur astronomers on La Palma and Astrotour are holding two star parties.

You'll be able to observe the sun through a telescope (safely!) in Santa Cruz de la Palma in the Plaza España from 11 am to 1 pm.

And from 8 pm - 11pm there'll be nocturnal telescopes in the basketball court at La Polvacera in Breña Baja. And the residents' association will provide drinks.

In both cases, the Red Cross will be collecting for the people who lost their homes in the forest fire.

So you get astronomy and warm fuzzy feelings in one go.

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GRANTECAN: The big Canarian Telescope

This is GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio Canario / Big Canarian Telescope) on the Roque de los Muchachos observatory in La Palma. It will be inaugurated on July 24th. The king and queen of Spain are coming, and there are rumours that Dr. Brian May is coming too. The telescope and its first two instruments cost €105 million: 90% of this came from Spain, 5% from Mexico, and 5% from the University of Florida. They'll share the observing time in the same proportions.

They aren't kidding about the "big" part, as it's the biggest telescope in the world. If you took the telescope out of the dome, there'd be room for a tennis court in there. The main mirror is 10.4 metres across. For comparison, the next biggest telescope in Europe, the William Herschel Telescope, has a mirror 4.2 metres across. But while the Herschel's has one big mirror, GranTeCan has 36 hexagonal segments, each over 2 metres from point to point. They're probably the best quality optical surface in the world, too. (The special glass used for ceramic hobs was developed for astronomical mirrors. I bet you didn't know that.)

The aim of all this is to gather more light, which means that the telescope can see fainter, hence more distant objects then anyone's seen before. Since light takes time to travel, that means it's looking back in time. They don't know exactly what they'll discover. That's the whole point.

Galileo's first telescope was enough for him to see sunspots, Jupiter's moons and the phases of Venus (it waxes and wanes, like the moon) and get him into terrible, terrible trouble with the Church. All that with a telescope diameter of about 4cm.

I'm looking forward to see what Grantecan finds with an extra 10.36 metres.

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Visiting the Observatory, 2009

GranTeCan, the huge new Spanish telescope

La Palma is home to one of the three most important astronomical observatories in the world. (The other two are Hawaii and the Atacama desert in Chile.) The observatory sits at the top of the island, at the Roque de los Muchachos. It's a fascinating place to visit, but it's not normally open to tourists - they're too busy doing science. You can visit the mountain top and see the buildings from the outside any day of the year. But please note:

• Days only, not nights. The William Herschel Telescope could see a candle on the moon, and the MAGIC telescope is even more sensitive. They really don't like car headlights. Some years ago there was an incident some years ago where a bus shone its lights right at the Herschel's dome. Now there's a barrier across the road which is shut a half an hour after sunset, and raised around dawn.
• The road to the observatory is usually blocked for a few days each winter, by snow or landslides. Use your common sense. If the sign at the bottom of the mountain road says it's blocked, don't go up. I once rescued a couple of German tourists who'd spent the night in the car in the drainage ditch, after going past the sign, thinking that the weather couldn't be all that bad in the Canaries. It can. That night it was thick fog, 60 mph winds, and -5C. Thank God they didn't try to walk, because they'd have frozen to death for sure.

Since the MAGIC gamma ray telescope doesn't have a building, you get quite a good view from the outside. You can get fairly close by parking on one of the heliports (the bottom left as you go up the hill). From there, a footpath goes closer, and there's a display panel that explains how the telescope works.

If you want to see inside, you need to go on a guided tour. In 2009 they will hold 28 open days, each with only one group. Each visit starts with a visit to the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope, followed by one other telescope, and lasts about two hours. Visits must be booked in advance, by calling the receptionist at the Institute of Astronomy on (00 34) 922 425 703. And yes, the receptionist speaks English. Book early -- the places go fast. But no children under 12 allowed.

They also hold private visits, usually for schools or visiting astronomers. You can email your request to adminorm@iac.es. I believe the person who reads the email, speaks English. To be honest, they're unlikely to organise a visit for the average tourist, but if there's a visit organised anyway, you might be able to tag along. Cross your fingers!


The MAGIC gamma-ray telescope

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Asteroid strike

A small asteroid, some 3 metres in diameter, came screaming in at 12 km /s (27,000 mph) and exploded over northern Sudan at 2:45 am on Tuesday October 7th. They don't think any of the bits would have been big enough to hit the ground. This is the first time an asteroid has been spotted and tracked before impact.

And the reason it's on this blog is that the William Herschel Telescope got a spectrum of the fireball as it zipped over the CanaryIslands.

Cool!

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R.I.P. Florian Goebel

Florien was the project manager for MAGIC II, the second of the huge Cherenkov telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos. The telescope was due to be inaugurated next week, on the 19^th. That's been delayed now, because somehow he fell from the prime focus tower in the dark last night. The tower is about ten metres (33ft) high, and Florien's dead.

I only ever had one conversation with him. He must have been very busy, but he took time out to help me with a magazine article. I always think that's the acid test of character: how you treat people who are of no possible use to you.

My husband worked for him for three weeks, fitting mirror segments to MAGIC II, and said several times how nice he was.

My sincere sympathies to his family.

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Stargazing

The island's association of amateur astronomers will be holding a star party on Saturday, from 8pm, behind the trees in the plaza beside the tourist office in El Paso. There will be lots of amateur telescopes there, so you can get a good look at, say, Saturn or Jupiter, and they plan to be there until midnight. I gather they speak some English.

La Palma has amazing skies. This is a great opportunity, especially if you live in a big city where the street lights drown out the stars.

For information phone Toño Gonzalez on 607592175.

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The William Herschel Telescope

The William Herschel Telescope at sunset.

The William Herschel Telescope is currently the biggest and best optical telescope in Europe (until GranTeCan opens this autumn.) The main mirror is 4.2 m across (165", or 13' 9") which astronomers call "a good light bucket". It's rather old as world-class telescopes go, since it opened in 1987, but it still produced excellent science. In fact data from the WHT has been used for about 1,500 scientific papers. It helps that it's been fitted with adaptive optics.

This is when you use some starlight to measure the air turbulence, and then deform a special, flexible mirror to compensate for that turbulence. It's rather like using glasses to correct for the shape of your eyeball, but these glasses change shape 100 times a second.

This only works if you have a bright star handy, in order to measure the turbulence in the first place. Some parts of the sky have far more stars than others, so the WHT has a laser, which can be used to create an artificial star. To the best of my knowledge, it's the only one working in Europe (although GranTeCan will have one too.)


The telescope's named after Frederick William Herschel, who was born in Germany but emigrated to England. He started life as a musician, but music lead to mathematics and then to astronomy. He's best known for discovering the planet Uranus, but he also measured the height of the mountains on the moon, discovered double stars, catalogued loads of nebulas, found two of Saturn's moons and two of Uranus's moons, and was the first to realise that the solar system is moving around the galaxy. Oh, and he discovered infra-red radiation.

Pretty impressive for someone who didn't really get started on astronomy until his mid-forties. (Obviously there's hope for me yet.)

If you want to visit the WHT, you have to sign up in advance for an open day. Details at: http://lapalmaisland.sheilacrosby.com/articles/visit_obs.php


Inside the William Herschel Telescope, beside the secondary mirror.

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Satelite Photo of La Palma

This is one photo I didn't take myself - I wish! As you probably guessed, it's a NASA photo, taken from the Space Shuttle.

If you want to see the high-resolution version, together with some text about the geology of La Palma, and how the image was taken, click
here.

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The Swedish Solar Tower

Two of the fourteen telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory are solar telescopes -- highly specialised to observe our own sun. This is the Swedish Solar Telescope, which was the first telescope built on the Roque. It's currently the best solar telescope in the world since they added the new adaptive optics in 2005. (Adaptive optics compensate for air turbulence.) It can resolve details of the sun's surface only 70km across.

Whereas most telescopes struggle to collect enough light, the main design problem for solar telescopes is air turbulence caused by heat. They solved this by making most of the tower a vacuum tube. Of course that means that the 1 metre lens at the top of the tower has to be very strong to cope with the pressure difference, as well as optically perfect.

The rounded thingamybob on the top of the tower behind the man is called a heliostat: it follows the sun across the sky and sends the image down the tower to the instruments in the basement.

And here is the basement. At the top left you can see the bottom of circle where the sunlight comes down, together with some of the copper water pipes for cooling it. The light is then split up: some goes to the adaptive optics and most to a series of cameras, each of which observes a different wavelength.

They observe things like sunspots, which are areas of the sun's surface where an intense magnetic field interferes with convection, and keeps the temperature to a mere 4000 ºC, instead of 5800 ºC like the rest. Each spot may be several times the size of the Earth.

If you want more details, the telescope's home page is here

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Visiting the Observatory

GranTeCan, the huge new Spanish telescope

La Palma is home to one of the three most important astronomical observatories in the world. (The other two are Hawaii and the Atacama desert in Chile.) The observatory sits at the top of the island, at the Roque de los Muchachos.

It's a fascinating place to visit, but it's not normally open to tourists - they're too busy doing science.

You can visit the mountain top and see the buildings from the outside any day of the year. But please note:

• Days only, not nights. The William Herschel Telescope could see a candle on the moon, and the MAGIC telescope is even more sensitive. They really don't like car headlights. Some years ago there was an incident some years ago where a bus shone its lights right at the Herschel's dome. Now there's a barrier across the road which is shut a little before sunset, and raised a little after dawn.


• The road to the observatory is usually blocked for a few days each winter, by snow or landslides. Use your common sense. If the sign at the bottom of the mountain road says it's blocked, don't go up. I once rescued a couple of German tourists who'd spent the night in the car in the drainage ditch, after going past the sign, thinking that the weather couldn't be all that bad in the Canaries. It can. That night it was thick fog, 60 mph winds, and -5ºC. Thank God they didn't try to walk, because they'd have frozen to death for sure.

Sine the MAGIC gamma ray telescope doesn't have a building, you get quite a good view from the outside. You can get fairly close by parking on one of the helipads (the bottom left as you go up the hill). From there, a footpath goes closer, and there's a display panel that explains how the telescope works.

The observatory is open to visitors for a few days a year. This year's dates haven't been decided yet. You reserve your place on the form at http://www.iac.es/orm/visitas/novedad/visitas.htm Each visit lasts about two hours, and you get a guided tour in English or Spanish (say which when you book!) round several telescopes. Be warned that the schedule sometimes slips, and you might have to wait around.

They also hold private visits, usually for schools or visiting astronomers. You can email your request to adminorm@iac.es. Ana, who reads the email, speaks English. To be honest, they're unlikely to organise a visit for the average tourist, but if there's a visit organised anyway, you might be able to tag along. Cross your fingers!


The MAGIC gamma-ray telescope

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Starlit Skies

Galaxy M51 taken with the Isaac Newton Telescope and Wide Field Camera by Simon Driver.

There's a really simple reason why the Royal Greenwich Observatory moved their telescopes here. It's one of the three best places in the world for astronomy.

The observatory was founded in 1675 by Charles II of England - hence the "royal" for £520 (£20 over budget!). It was the first purpose-built scientific research facility in Britain.

At the time, Greenwich was a great place to build it - away from the air pollution of London, but near enough for His Majesty to pop over when he felt like it.

And then London grew and grew and swallowed Greenwich whole, and the smog got worse and worse. And streetlights became common, so the whole sky glowed. The observatory moved to Herstmonceux Castle on the south coast of Britain. This solved the problem with London, but they still had the British weather to contend with. Meanwhile, air travel was getting cheaper. When they were ready to build the next generation of telescopes, it made sense to look for a really good site.

A modern telescope could see the equivalent of a candle on the moon, so obviously they want to be well away from city lights. Even more obviously, they want to be somewhere that doesn't get many cloudy nights.

Much less obviously, they want to be somewhere the stars don't twinkle. This happens when the air's turbulent. It's pretty, but it really messes up your view.

There are three places in the world which are great on all three counts, and La Palma is one of them. (The other two are the peak of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the Atacama Desert in Chile.)

The problem is to keep it that way.

When the observatory moved here, they asked for, and got, an agreement to limit things like street lights. Los Llanos has a street with lamps which remind me of 1950's hairdryers - the sort that go all around your head.

Recently the island government committed to spending over a million euros to update the streetlights to reduce the light pollution even further.

The result of all this is that La Palma is a great place for amateur astronomers, too. Even in a resort, people notice how many more stars you see here, compared to almost any English town or city. Here's another picture of M51 taken by my friends in Franceses with an 80mm amateur telescope on their first night's astronomy since they moved here. Of course there's a lot of skill involved too. But they used to live in Streatham, and no amount of skill would produce that kind of result there.

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SuperWASP, the Planet-Hunter

Most of the telescopes at the observatory here look spectacular even from the outside. SuperWASP looks like a big garden shed. It's the white thing at bottom left.

Even when it opens up, it still doesn't look like a professional telescope. To me, it looks more like a small missile launcher.


The equipment isn't that spectacular either. As modern telescopes go, it was built for peanuts. It has eight cameras, each with a Canon 200mm f/1.8 lens and a 2048 x 2048 pixel CCD. Most professional telescopes have the digital camera cooled by liquid nitrogen, to keep them down to about -170ºC. The colder they are, the less grainy the picture is. SuperWASP has peltier cooled cameras working at -50ºC, like a really dedicated amateur.

The spectacular bit it the results. WASP stands for "Wide Angle Search for Planets". It's found ten new planets in the last six months. These aren't in our Solar System. They're orbiting other stars. The three they netted last year made Time magazine's the "Top Ten Science Discoveries of 2007".

It's quite a trick to find an extra-solar planet, because they don't shine themselves. True, they reflect light, just as Mars and Jupiter do, but that's only about 1/1,000,000th of the light of the parent star. It's like trying to spot a candle flame beside a tactical nuke. The first extra-solar planets were found by looking for stars wobbling as a large planet orbited close in.


Image: Wikipedia

But this only works for unusually large planets, unusually close in.

SuperWASP uses the transit method. It tries to spot a star getting 1% dimmer as a plant passes in front of it, blocking some of the light. This is a bit like trying to catch a spotlight getting dimmer as an ant crawls across it. And of course it only works if the planet's orbit is edge-on to us. But the great advantage of superWASP is that looks at 100,000 stars per camera per photo. Eventually they have to strike oil.

Lightcurve animation of a transit in HD209458, from Queen's University, Belfast, UK.

The catch is that you can't possibly look at 50Gb of data per night by hand. Computers take care of the routine part automatically, and produce a list of stars with fluctuating brightness. Then someone at either the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, the Swiss Euler Telescope in Chile or the Observatoire de Haute Provence in southern France tries to catch the star wobbling. It it's wobbling and dimming in snych -- bingo!



I still can't believe this works so well. And the really cool bit is that I used to know the team's leader, Dr Don Pollaco.

If you want to know more, see
http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/wasp/

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The MAGIC telescope

This is the MAGIC telescope (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope). It's perhaps the most exotic telescope at the observatory at the Roque de los Muchachos.

It's not an optical telescope. Instead of observing visible light, it's looking for gamma rays. Visible light is made up of different wavelengths, which give the different colours from red to violet. Wavelengths which are just a bit too short to see form ultra-violet (the stuff that gives you sunburn). Even shorter lengths are X-rays, and the shortest of all are gamma rays. The snag is that gamma rays don't get through the earth's atmosphere. But as they break up, they create a cascade of particles in the upper atmosphere, and the telescope is looking for these. By looking at the cone of atomic debris, the scientists can work backwards and find out which direction the gamma ray was coming from.

The nearer "basket" won't be operational until next year, but the father "basket" is already going strong. Instead of one big mirror, it has over 1,000 mirrors, each 50cm square, to form a compound mirror 17m (56 ft) across. That's the biggest telescope mirror in the world.

So where do gamma rays come from?

Some come from active galactic nuclei. These are the centres of distant galaxies, which are strangely bright. Astronomers believe this is because there's a super-massive black hole gobbling up the nearby stars. But they don't really understand the details, which is why they're keen to study them.

Supernova remnants are another source of gamma rays. When a large star runs out of its atomic fuel, it creates a massive explosion. Supernova remnants are the smoking gun, and the best available clue to understand supernovas. (Our own star is too small to explode in this way. Eventually it'll just fizzle out, but we have about four billion years before that happens.)

And the final source is gamma ray bursts. These are mysterious bursts of energy, which last anything from twenty seconds to two minutes. There's an orbiting satellite which watches out for them, and alerts the much larger, earth-based telescopes when it sees one. When that happens, MAGIC immediately turns to look at it. It's amazingly nimble for such a huge telescope. The whole basket weighs about 60 tons, but it can slew to point at any part of the sky within twenty seconds.

Arthur C. Clark once said that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. So you could say that MAGIC is magic.

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The Observatory

Twinkling stars are pretty, but astronomers would much rather they didn't. The twinkle is caused by movement in the air above you (the same as a mirage on very hot days) and it stops the astronomers getting a clear view. The Hubble Telescope gets such wonderfully clear images because it's out of the atmosphere altogether. But there's only one Hyubble, and it cost a fortune.

So they build ground-based telescopes wherever the airflow is really smooth, which means that the stars twinkle less. Of course, they also need to be away from city lights and clouds. The three best places in the world are La Silla in Chile, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma. They each have observatories.

The La Palma observatory has twelve operational telescopes. From the largest aperture to the smallest, they are:

• MAGIC (17 m) a gamma-ray imaging Cherenkov telescope, which has the biggest telescope mirror in the world.
• William Herschel Telescope: (4.2 m) reflecting telescope
• Telescopio Nazionale Galileo: (3.5 m) reflecting telescope
• Nordic Optical Telescope: (2.56 m) reflecting telescope
• Isaac Newton Telescope: (2.5 m) reflecting telescope
• Liverpool Telescope: (2.0 m) robotic telescope (also reflecting)
• Mercator Telescope: (1.2 m) reflecting telescope
• Swedish Solar Telescope: (1.0 m) refracting vacuum solar telescope (the best in the world)
• Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope: (1.0 m) reflecting telescope
• Dutch Open Telescope: (0.45 m) reflecting solar telescope
• Carlsberg Meridian Telescope: (0.18 m) refracting telescope, used for measuring star positions.
• SuperWASP: (8 wide angle cameras with 0.11 m diameter lenses) surveying for extra-solar planets.

Plus GranTeCan (pictured), which is under construction and which has a huge 10.4 m mirror.

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Snow

So here we are in this lovely sub-tropical island, land of eternal spring. And the top of the mountain is covered with snow.

Last night's rain turned into a storm, with far too much thunder and lightning to sleep through. It went on for hours.

And this morning, I could see snow on the mountain. Not just the peak (the Roque de los Muchachos at 2426 m or 7,959 ft), which was covered in cloud, but much lower down, too.

Of course, we only ever get snow at high altitude, and these days, we don't get snow every winter. But when it snows, it can dump several feet in one night.

The Roque is one of the three best sites in the world for astronomy, so there's a major international observatory up there. Of course, they expect occasional snow, so they're geared up for it. They have 4x4 vehicles, and in winter they carry snow chains and shovels, just in case. Unless it's cloudy, they carry right on observing.

This is the Isaac Newton Telescope, looking Christmassy.

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