The observatory in Tenerife sits 2,400 metres high in Izaña and is just short of the shadow of Mount Teide, the highest Mount in Spain.
The location and the view up there offer every visitor a wonderfully beautiful view. But the visual spectacle, the sight projected into the eye by the telescopes, can be found inside the buildings that were specially built for this mission. Star tourism has been promoted on Tenerife for years and now an extra dimension is added. The event Volcano Teide Experience, offers guided visits for five days a week in French, English, Italian, Spanish or German, depending on the day you chose when booking.
Visit
The Observatory in Tenerife is called Teide Observatory was opened in 1964 and specialises in the study of the sun, while stars and comets are observed at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory in La Palma. Since 2015, one can visit Izaña to take a guided walk through and along the infrastructure used to study the solar system.
The visit lasts an hour and a half and starts at the car park. Forty people can simultaneously go through the visitor centre to the room where the telescope IAC-80 is set up. The highlight of the visit is always the observation of the sun and sunspots that can be viewed with a telescope equipped with a hydrogen filter.
IAC-80 telescope
When visiting the observatory, you are confronted with the history of astronomy in the Canary Islands, which began in 1964. Work was done with modest resources but the years that followed were used to develop equipment and knowledge. The big leap forward was in 1991 when, after 10 years of developing the latest IAC-80 telescope, the Instituto Astrofísico de Canarias (IAC) observed a ‘brown dwarf’ for the first time in history. This is a celestial body smaller than a star but larger than a gas giant.
IAC-80 stands for the name of the observatory, followed by the size in centimetres of the mirror used to make the observation.
Intense energy explosions
The observations made with the IAC-80 are diverse. For instance, objects that fly by closer, such as comets, are viewed. In this way, the collision of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy against Jupiter was closely followed and observed. With the IAC-80, they also look further into space, to even the most remote locations, such as to quasars (active centre of a galaxy of very high brightness) and to gravitational lensing (strong gravitational field of a star system or of a black hole). Years of gravitational lensing observations have provided information about the dark matter of the universe and provided imaging of the celestial body responsible for a violent gamma-ray explosion, one of the most intense energy explosions ever observed in the universe.
Solar telescope
The astrophysics institute is open to all scientific communities interested in three areas: the study of microwaves investigating the origin of the universe, telescope operation at night and the study area of the sun. That is why the institute is linked to the Themis telescopes (France and Italy), which have a mirror diameter of 90 centimetres, and to Gregor (Germany), which is the most important and largest solar telescope in Europe. The mirror measures one and a half metres and was installed in 2012.
One of the devices at Izaña is the solar pyramid that studies the seismology of the sun. At once the only observatory of its kind in the world within the field of night observatories for the study of the universe. The OGS, the optical ground station has a one-metre mirror. One of its tasks is to catalogue and map space debris. Another device is El Quijote, a Spanish microwave telescope and unique in the world developed to solve the mystery of the origin of the universe. High-tech stuf.
Visits
When visiting the astrophysics centre in Izaña, it only becomes clear how small the earth is and, above all, that we as humans walking around on it are almost invisible.
To visit Tenerife’s Observatory in Izaña, click [HERE]
Michel Poederbach © Photography
Observatory in Tenerife ©
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