During the week from November 21, 2021 to November 28, I went to La Palma to upgrade the Mercator Observatory Control System (MOCS) to a new version. Because the Cumbre Vieja volcano was still eruption, the trip to La Palma was a real adventure! We departed Brussels around noon on November 21, but when we arrived in Madrid, there were no flights to La Palma anymore, because the airport was closed. After spending a few hours waiting, we were put on the waiting list for the first flight to Tenerife on Monday. As there were a lot of people on the waiting list, we could not get on the plane, so we had to rethink our plans again. They wanted to put us on the waiting list for the next flight to Tenerife, but as we could not be sure that we could get on the flight, we asked to rebook us to Gran Canaria. From Gran Canaria, we took a Binter Canarias flight to Tenerife and on Tenerife, we took a bus from Tenerife Norte to Los Cristianos. There we could take the boat to La Palma. We arrived on La Palma on Monday evening around 23:00. We still drove to the Roque de los Muchachos that same evening.
The work went quite well, but the weather was not so good, so I could not observe anything... But we had the opportunity to see the volcano in action. We already could see some nice colored sky from the mountain, but the last day, we went closed and could see the volcano in action.
The volcano as seen from the Roque de los Muchachos
On August 30, 2023 we installed an ASA AZ800 telescope in the observatory at work, at the Institute of Astronomy of KU Leuven . The telescope will be one of the telescopes of the MARVEL project, an array of four telescope we will install on the Roque de los Muchachos in La Palma, It was a very rainy day, but we managed to put the telescope in the observatory. Enjoy some of the pictures! The upper part of the telescope in the corridor. The lower part of the telescope ready for lifting up. The lower part of the telescope going up. The lower part of the telescope entering the dome. The upper part of the telescope entering the dome. The installed telescope.
For Father's day, I got the field edition of the Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas . In the past, I always used the first edition of Uranometria 2000.0 by Will Tirion, which was published in 1987! I was always very happy with the Uranometria and I always preferred the first edition over the second edition. I never took the book outside, but I made a copy of every page which I put in a sheet protector. I took the pages in a big folder outside to starhop through the skies. The Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas comes in a nice sturdy slipcase. The last years, I mostly observed from home (Bortle 5), so I mostly observe bright objects. Since last year, I added a SkyFI 3 to my Argo Navis / ServoCat so I can use SkySafari to always have a map on my phone or my tablet. However, a real star atlas has a nicer overview, which is very useful when observing. Under dark skies, a good star atlas is really needed to find the faintest objects. A nice card with the legend of the atlas The nice t
I was on La Palma from January 15 to January 21 for a technical mission at the Mercator telescope. The weather was not very good, but I managed to get out the Orion Skyquest XT12i IntelliScope we have in the Mercator building on the first evening I was there. I forgot already that the sky is so unbelievably good from the Roque de los Muchachos. There was quite some wind, but I could hide behind the car, so the wind did not disturb me that much. The telescope has a right angle finder and a telrad, but the batteries of the telrad were empty, so I could not use the telrad. Pointing the telescope with only a right angle finder is very difficult, so it was not easy to find the objects I was looking for. It was quite cold, with a temperature of 2.3° when I started observing around 19h40 and a temperature of 3.7° when I stopped around 22h15. The humidity fell from 57.5% to 33.2% and the wind speed was around 6 m/s. I did not observe for a very long time, because I had to wake up ve
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