Category: Miscellaneous

Astrocups – The perfect Christmas present for Astro-Fans!

/ Carsten / 1 Comment
astro_cups_border

Merry Christmas to everyone! Well, if you are still looking for an astronomy related Christmas present you are probably a little late this year 😀 But maybe you just found something for next year… Using some of my best images I composed some fancy “astrocups”. Next time you prepare for your star-gazing event you should have one of these with you! To produce the cups I used the service of https://www.luebeckgeschenke.de/ (more exactly here). The images are designed for the “standard cup (white)” and the “black cup” with a dimension of 1496 × 630 pixels, 200×200 ppi. Here are the three best ones so far:

cup3_2

1. The “Black Hole Cup”

This cup symbolizes a black hole just like the center of M51 – the Whirlpool Galaxy which is printed on the cup. This image is the outcome of a long night in May 2015. Personally I think this cup is best suited for black coffee…

Download

2. The “Good night Cup”

The “Good night cup” has images of Jupiter, Saturn, our moon and the sun. The photo of the sun has been taken during the partial solar eclipse in March 2015. The moon is a small version of the moon mosaic recorded in July 2015.

Download
cup1_2
cup2_1

3. The “Star-gazer Cup”

Finally, the Star-gazer cup reminds me on the time I spent on La Palma. The cup is white since the sky is already dark enough there…

Download

Clear skies!

Last updated: June 16, 2022 at 21:24 pm

Day and Night on La Palma – The highlights from my last La Palma holiday

/ Carsten / 3 Comments

On my last La Palma holiday I did lots of experiments with my X-T1 camera. This time I was especially looking into time-lapsing. The result is “Day and Night on La Palma” – a 5 minute video about this beautiful island. To me, La Palma is the perfect place for doing this kind of videos. In this short video I want to show the highlights of my last holiday. Lots of stars, clouds and sunsets… 🙂 In order to make this video I visited many different places of the island. Some of them were Roque de Los Muchachos, Mirador del Jable, Mirador del Time and Pico Birigoyo. The music title “Worlds” has been composed by Jacob Tyler. I found it on www.soundcloud.com. I hope you enjoy the video 🙂

For those who are interested in technical details:

Continue reading →

Sunset on Roque de Los Muchachos on La Palma

/ Carsten / 1 Comment
William Herschel Telescope (WHT) after sunset, Roque de Los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain

To me, sunset at Roque de Los Muchachos creates a special atmosphere which is hard to describe. Probably this is something what especially people addicted to astronomy can understand. When the sun crosses the horizon the different telescope domes open up and the first stars become visible. While many people are sitting at home in front of their TV great things happen up here – far off the world 🙂

Many different telescopes from many different nations are located up here at Roque de Los Muchachos. Here is just a subset of those I recognized so far:

As far as I experienced, the northern part of the observatory is not reachable by car – at least there are some “Staff only” signs on the road. However, there is a small path which leads up to the Puente Nueva peak. If you park the car at 28°45’46.5″N 17°52’29.1″W right beside the road, walking up there takes only about 15-20 minutes. From there one has a great view on this part of the observatory!

Clear skies!

Last updated: June 17, 2022 at 21:07 pm