At long last I'm finally getting round to posting some of the results of my trip to La Palma and the WHT (which was about two months ago now).This is me (probably) breaking health and safety regulations and a risk assessment by not wearing an long sleeved shirt or a hat out in the sun, not to mention standing on the top of a rather unstable sandy cliff top with a 20ft drop to get this picture. Oh well.
That's GranTeCan in the background which (at the moment) is the world's largest telescope. I got to go inside last year and it is huge!
I'm rather proud of this one even if I did just take it on my iPhone and then stick the individual pictures together. On the left you can see the WHT (the larger dome) then moving right you see the Isaac Newton Telescope and finally the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope.
The conditions were abysmal for astronomy while I was on the island. There was dust in the upper atmosphere which was being blown across from large sandstorms in Africa and there was quite a lot of high cloud (which doesn't happen that often at La Palma). Saying that, it did make for some impressive pictures when the dust cleared a bit.
This was about the third day I was on La Palma and the dust had cleared just enough so you can see across to Tenerife. This was taken on a little walk I had around part of the caldera rim near the Isaac Newton Telescope.
I also rather like this one. It's got a bit of telephoto on it to try and catch some of the detail but I don't often see cloud spilling over ridges. The last time I saw something even vaguely like this was in Oxford on Port Meadow down by the river. I'd gotten up early to walk the dogs for some reason and it was fairly cold. Mist was boiling up off the river, rising up in the air and then falling back about 20 ft from the river bank so it was forming a tunnel by the river. It didn't last for long and I wish I'd had a camera with me.