The First Trip (January 1998)

My first observation trip to La Palma took place on 17th - 22nd Jan 1998. I reserved a regular flight from Tuorla Observatory's co-operative travel agency. The route just seemed a bit rough: Turku-Helsinki-Amsterdam-Madrid- Tenerife-La Palma ... La Palma-Tenerife-Barcelona-Brussels-Helsinki-Turku. The first of the six days of the trip was going to spend in flying from Turku to La Palma, the next two at Santa Cruz de la Palma, the next two at the Observatory, and the last one on the way back to Finland. I reserved my hotel rooms by sending email to Paco Armas in La Palma who is the administrator of NOT. He reserved a room for me both at the observatory Residencia and at Aparthotel Castillete in Santa Cruz. He also reserved me a car to be rented for three days. Because of the co-operation deals of the observatory both hotel bill and car rental were considerably less expensive than usually.

Before I started my journey I had to contact the IACn (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) financial office to get a EU funding for my flights and stay at the Residencia. I also had to fill in a WWW form to let the NOT personnel to know what kind of instruments I was going to need.

On Saturday 17th of January I woke up early in the morning to catch the plane to Helsinki; scheduled to leave at 7 am. I had anticipated, with some delight, to benefit of the new co-operation between Finnair and Iberia by at least being able to check in all the way to Tenerife. But no, the clerk at the check in desk in Turku returned me back to the real world by telling me that "We can't check you in but to Amsterdam, it is a different company after that." Of course, I forgot that nothing useful can result from such a co-operation. In addition the Turku-Helsinki plane was almost full and the pilot landed it like throwing a bag of potatoes to the ground.

Fortunately I did not have to wait long in Helsinki. I continued to Amsterdam this time in an almost empty plane. The flight was comfortable and the landing perfect--I started to feel much better. In Amsterdam I had to wait for three hours but I didn't mind since I had not been there before. I explored the services of the air port and started to write all this down. I checked myself in to the Iberia flights to Madrid and further to Tenerife. "I am sorry, sir. Your connecting flight from Tenerife to La Palma is with Binter Canarias and we can not book you in with them from here." A lesson to Finnair staff, when that was told to me with a happy, but apologetic, smile I was only happy to hear the - not so bad - news.

However, on the flight the service wasn't much different from the Finnair service. The same tired and indifferent faces performed the compulsory feeding and presenting of safety instructions. Even food belonged to the class, where air plane food got its questionable fame. Fortunately the plane was only half full and pilots competent.

The Madrid air port was enormous. The clever architects had placed all signs and monitors to the departure lounge--nowhere near the gate where we got out of the Amsterdam plane. When I finally found my departure gate to Tenerife, I noticed that there were three different flight numbers assigned to the plane; and a corresponding number of people waiting for the flight. Not surprisingly the plane got full as far as I could see. The flight did nothing to improve my image of Iberia.

We arrived to Tenerife a quarter early. It was cloudy and coldish at the famous holiday island. The northern air port (for Spanish internal traffic) of Tenerife is small and simple, so it took me a whole five minutes to find the departure area and to check in for my Binter Canarias flight to La Palma. That short flight threw Binter Canarias immediately to third place on my airline company superiority list (where British Airways holds the first place and Air France the second). The planes of this small company are clean and cosy and the staff well chosen. The air hostesses were cute, courteous, cheerful, and friendly. During the half an hour flight they served a candy on takeup and landing to help balance the ear pressure, they served chocolate bars in mid flight and water for the thirsty, they went about asking people for their wishes and managed to give an impression that you were the only one travelling in first class.

I arrived to La Palma at eight thirty, when it was already a dark night. I took a taxi to my hotel in Santa Cruz de la Palma. My reservation was in order so I got my room and went to bed after a quick shower.

On Sunday (18 JAN) I checked out the city, which turned out to be small and quiet (at least on Sunday). I ate a large local salad, cod in whiskey, and half a bottle of red wine for a very reasonable price of 13 USD in Restaurant Canarias. In the evening I went out to see the weather, which had been cloudy all day. I stepped out of the hotel but street lights were too bright for me to see anything in the sky and I decided to walk across the street. At that precise moment the street light on top of me went out and I was able to see the cloudy sky. When I started to return back to the hotel the street light switched on again - cute, the first polite street light I have met so far.

On Monday morning (19 JAN) I woke up early to have plenty of time to make myself ready for the drive to the observatory (Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos - ORM). As I walked into the room where breakfast was being served I noticed a naval officer dressed in shining white uniform sitting in the bar. After the breakfast I went out to change some FMK into Spanish Pesetas. I noticed a beautiful four-masted sailing-ship anchored just outside the harbour of Santa Cruz... and still cloudy weather. However, it was getting clear and I was able to see the silhouettes of Tenerife and La Gomera on the horizon. I paid my room, received the car from the manager/owner of the car rental agency, and met Mr. Armas who was going to guide me to the observatory - just like we had agreed on email before my trip. I followed his car driving my own Seat Marbella up the mountain on a road that seemed to go on and on forever. We passed one layer of clouds on our way up and an another was still above us when we reached the observatory. My most important discovery that day was that I really hate cars without automatic gear and especially Seat Marbellas.

We went to the observatory Residencia, I got a brief introduction of the place and its routines. And as I had expected my room was just like any hotel room. Eating arrangements were peculiar: well before meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack to be taken to the observatory domes) one must fill in his attendance in each of them in a list on the dining room wall. In addition, on the way to the dining room one must drop a little coupon with his name, date, and the type of meal to a little box on the counter. A long night of observing takes up some energy and the snacks replace it; there are two sizes of snacks at ORM: snack and supersnack. The snack costs about 500 pesetas and the supersnack 1500 pesetas. On a list of various items one can mark the items (and amounts of those) he wants to be included in his snack (as long as the total cost of the selected items does not go over the price of the snack. When leaving to the domes, one can fetch his snack from the kitchen.

I had one evening free before my observing night so I just wrote a few post cards, dined, and followed the weather on WWW. Especially useful were the cloud animations where a day's satellite images are shown in a sequence so that the movement of the clouds is clearly visible. With these I was able to make estimations of how the weather was going to be for the next few hours. It was and seemed to stay cloudy.


NOT with its environment
The NOT with its environment. The telescope is naturally in the silvery dome. In the other building there are some recreational facilities and some office rooms. The air is a bit hazy because of a dusty wind from Sahara. That haziness is visible in all the photos on these pages.

After a well slept night I woke up on Tuesday morning (20 JAN) and drove to NOT after eating breakfast. I was supposed to meet my support astronomer Colin Aspin, as we had agreed on email the day before. Instead I met software engineer Ingvar Svärdh who told me that Colin was coming in late due to car trouble. He showed me around NOT before I returned to Residencia. For the rest of the day I lived in suspense because the sky was and seemed to stay cloudy. I checked the web animations regularly but all they showed was a huge cloud formation south of the Canary Islands pushing continuously new clouds over the islands. I also kept my colleagues at Tuorla in agony reporting the weather to them via email.



The dome of NOT
The dome of NOT. When a telescope is used for observations it must be rotated along with the rotation of the celestial sphere to keep objects in the field of the telescope. At NOT this has been built so that the entire dome rotates with the telescope and the telescope inside is rotatable separately if the dome stops for any reason. Unexpected halts in the dome rotation happen sometimes as people or animals trigger on the security system at the bottom of the main entrance stairs. The system is needed to avoid unfortunate accidents in case someone gets stuck in the stairs (the dome weighs 43 tons). The strange object next to the dome is a piece of machinery used to lift the main mirror out of the dome when it is being taken to be aluminized (the weight of the mirror is almost two thousand kilograms).

When the night was falling I returned to NOT and met Colin who told me that poor weather had prevented observations on several nights before this one. We made NOT and ourselves ready for the observations, if nothing else at least for rehearsal. When the Sun set a surprising opening formed directly above us and we were able to start observing. All through the night we followed the movements of the clouds in satellite images and were even more astonished to see that there was a small hole circling above us but plenty of clouds all around. I have usually had very good luck with the weather of my astronomical observations but this was almost ridiculous (this sentence should not be taken literally since as a scientist I don't believe in luck but in coincidences). Even when we went outside to check the weather with our own eyes we could see the dark shadowy clouds around us on the horizon but beautiful, clear, starry sky above us. It was almost morning when the clouds finally rolled over the observatory. So, I got most of my observations made - including my IC 342 Cepheids - and I didn't have to return to Tuorla empty handed. The measurements of the spectrum of quasar OJ 287 gave us some trouble when everything didn't go as smoothly as we had anticipated. Without Colin's help I would not have survived my first observations at NOT at all.

For some hours in the evening we were accompanied by the next night's observer who came to see the telescope and the routines of using it. That is what I was supposed to do as well, but the night before mine had been too cloudy to make any observations. For a while it was almost crowded in the observing room when the electronics engineer of NOT Graham Cox came to check on the operation of the machinery.


Pico de Teide of Tenerife
Pico de Teide is the highest mountain on the island of Tenerife with the height of 3718 metres (12200 ft.). Tenerife is about 100 km (60 miles) from La Palma for which reason it is often difficult to see it when the weather is dusty or misty, especially from the beach.

On Wednesday morning (21 JAN) I switched off all the equipment (Colin had left a little earlier to sleep) and returned to Residencia where I went to bed just before 10 am. I slept (poorly) for three hours, got up, and drove back to the NOT to get my observations that Colin had burned on a CD-ROM. Once more I returned to Residencia to sign my meals and room to be paid by IAC. I drove down the mountain back to Santa Cruz de la Palma and made my way to Aparthotel Castillete where a rather charming receptionist girl remembered me and gave me my room key before I had a chance to introduce myself. I went to bed early after I had packed everything ready for the next morning.


Neighbours of NOT
Just next to NOT there are a few British telescopes, of which the most famous one is the William Herschel Telescope (WHT - mirror: 4.2 m or 165 in.) on the left. The other ones are Isaac Newton Telescope (mirror: 2.5 m or 100 in.) and Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (mirror: 1 m or 40 in.).
Political statement: As one of the first decisions the Labour party (!) did when they got the majority in the parliament of the United Kingdom was to abolish the oldest and most famous astronomical institute in the world. They close the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) which was founded by king Charles II in 1675. Some of the most famous astronomers of all times had worked there and the Washington Conference of 1884 fixed the meridian through Greenwich as the zero point of longitude. With the abolishment of RGO one or more of these telescopes on the photo are sold out or scrapped.


I woke up to Thursday (22 JAN) after a restless sleep, had some breakfast, and tried to pay my room with my VISA card. The VISA apparatus reported the line to Finland busy - and again when I had fetched my suitcase. I decided to pay with cash because I was running out of time. After that I had less than a dollar's worth of pesetas in my wallet. I drove, hastily, to air port on a road I didn't know, in a car I hated, but reached my destination in time. However, I did not have time to fill in the petrol as I should have. I got to the check in line 30 minutes before the scheduled departure. There were two check in desks open but one of them had a problematic customer and eventually the clerks of both desks were trying to check in the unfortunate passanger. Finally one of them left somewhere with her customer and our line started to get shorter. When I got myself checked in there were still some ten minutes to wait for the plane. Anyway, the day had started the way it was going to continue.

The flight to Tenerife was again a pleasant experience and Binter Canarias got some extra points in my list of airline companies. There was a lot of time before the plane to Barcelona was about to leave so naturally there were no problems whatsoever in check in. After I had been bored to death we finally departed. At first I enjoyed the sight of African mountains and then the Gibraltar which was as beautiful as a jewel with the Sun shining from the best possible direction to it. On the Mediterranean Sea I was able to see a glimpse of Mallorca before landing to Barcelona which was covered by a horrendous brownish yellow layer of smog.

There were no proper signs nor monitors in the area of Barcelona air port where we got out of the plane so I ran to a info desk a few hundred metres from the gate (there was no time to waste). The plane to Brussels was to leave from the departure hall M1, which naturally was in the opposite direction from our landing gate than the info desk was. I ran to the other end of the air port to find the monitor proclaiming "ESTIMAT 16:40" about the plane to Brussels. The plane was supposed to leave at 16:15 and anything after that might be too late for me to change planes in Brussels as I had to check in as well. I went to the info desk of this hall where a young lady happily declared that the flight was going to be on time. When I requested a reason for the time on the monitor she checked from her colleague who said that there was a mistake on the monitor, it was going to be corrected, and that the plane was going to leave on time. Their chief came by and noticed what was going on. He asked another lady to check the information on her computer and told me the result: the gate had changed from 12 to 17 but the plane was leaving on time. Finally the plane left 20 minutes late. At four o'clock an announcement (in Spanish and fortunately also in French) stated that the plane was leaving from gate 17. We approached gate 17 but there was a large sign with the text "Mallorca" on it. I heard the Iberia stewardess telling someone [in Spanish] that this was indeed the Brussels gate, for a while until the normal gate 12 is reinstated. We stepped out of the door into a bus, in which I saw plenty of people arriving to the gate 17, walking back a bit, and negotiating among themselves apparently of what to do. I never knew how many passangers never reached the plane at that time. Finally the bus drove us to the plane.

I waited for, with increasing excitement, our arrival to Brussels because I really had very little time to find and check in to the plane to Helsinki. Finally, out of the Barcelona plane I had 20 minutes to do this. Fortunately there was an occupied check in desk next to our landing gate and I was able to get instructions to terminal B to find the Finnair gates. We were in terminal C. The Brussels air port is enormous and running through it to terminal B I discovered it to be under renovations. There was a long detour around the area that was being renovated, but fortunately the signs were clear and multitudinous. Yet another stroke of fortune (an almost improbable coincident) was that the very first gate in terminal B was the one I was searching and that the check in desk was located just next to the gate. I was the last one to get into the plane - and the only one with an empty seat next to me. The flight went fine and we arrived to Helsinki early (at 10:50 pm.). That was bad luck because the last flight, the one to Turku, was scheduled at 0:30 am.

The time went so slowly that I died again of boredom. The Helsinki-Vantaa air port is totally dead at night; no shops or restaurants open and almost no passangers either. Soon we got a message that our flight was going to be delayed because a connecting flight from somewhere was delayed and we had to wait for people on that plane to arrive. Finally we left at 1:10 am. on a small SAAB which bobbed around in heavy winds. Especially in Turku the wind blew so hard that I thought we were going to crash to the air field. The bobbing stopped just a few metres from the runway so we survived. The curse of Thursday seemed to have lost its grip on me as I got lucky getting home. A docent from Tuorla Observatory Jia-Quing Zheng was waiting for our professor to arrive on that plane but since he wasn't on the plane Zheng offered me a ride home instead.


Back to my La Palma main page.




Back to home