The Roque de Los Muchachos Visitor Center in La Palma is a must-see destination for any astronomy enthusiast. This center offers a unique glimpse into the universe, featuring interactive exhibits and detailed explanations about the cosmos and the technology used to explore it. For those seeking a deeper experience, our astrotourism company provides specialized group guidance when you book your visit to the Observatory, enriching your trip with invaluable knowledge and unforgettable experiences.

50% Discount on Visitor Center Admission

When you purchase a guided tour of the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory with us, you will receive a 50% discount on admission to the Visitor Center. This offer is a perfect opportunity to enjoy a comprehensive astrotourism experience in La Palma.

Night Photography

Upon request, for groups or VIP activities, we organize nocturnal landscape photography routes at the Roque de Los Muchachos Visitor Center. This is a unique opportunity to learn this discipline with full support and facilities. If you are interested in this option, contact us for more details.

What Does It Offer?

The Center provides an educational and exciting experience for all ages. Its main attractions include:

• Interactive Exhibits: Learn about planets, stars, and galaxies through hands-on displays.
• Simulations and Presentations: Enjoy spectacular audiovisual presentations that will transport you to the far reaches of the universe.
• Telescope Models: Discover how telescopes work and their importance in modern astronomy.

Book Your Visit Today

How to Reserve?

To book your visit to the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory and take advantage of the discount on Visitor Center admission, visit our website. Simply show your ticket at the Visitor Center to receive the discounted entry. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore the universe with us.

Embark on an unforgettable astronomical adventure in La Palma. Book your guided tour of the Observatory today and enjoy a 50% discount on admission to the Roque de Los Muchachos Visitor Center. Explore, learn, and marvel at the mysteries of the cosmos!

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In the heart of the island of La Palma is a natural spectacle that captivates all those who venture to discover it: the Tajinastes on the Roque de los Muchachos. These majestic plants, endemic to the Canary Islands, with their flowers reaching up to the sky, are a feast for the eyes for anyone who visits the palm tree peaks.

The Roque de los Muchachos, known as the highest point on the island, provides the perfect backdrop for this natural wonder. At an altitude of more than 2,400 metres above sea level, the Tajinastes thrive in a unique environment, surrounded by the purity of the air and the breathtaking panoramic views.

When the landscape is dressed in colour, the Tajinastes become the centre of attention. Their flowers in shades of deep red, pink and white create a symphony of colours that contrasts with the deep blue of the sky and the green of the vegetation, together with their large size, which can reach up to three metres in height. The cold of winter or the intense heat of summer make spring the perfect season for its reproduction. Its peak flowering time is usually in mid-May, although it is possible to see this species in bloom until mid-June.

But the attraction of the Tajinastes goes beyond their visual beauty. They are a symbol of the natural wealth and biodiversity of La Palma. Walking among them, you can feel the connection with the land and the history of this island, where nature has sculpted unique landscapes over millennia.

For hikers and nature lovers, Roque de los Muchachos offers a network of trails that wind through the Tajinastes and lead to spectacular viewpoints. Every step is an opportunity to marvel at the beauty of the surroundings and immerse yourself in the tranquillity that only unspoilt nature can offer.

The Tajinastes on the Roque de los Muchachos invite travellers to enter a world of natural beauty and discover the magic hidden in every corner of this enchanted island.

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In recent years it seems to be fashionable to be able and to know how to photograph the Milky Way. No wonder it is in fashion and certainly a good trend…. After all, dark, starry skies are exceptionally beautiful and due to light pollution they have become scarce. On the island of La Palma, it is still possible to find dark skies easily and, in fact, it is considered one of the best places in the world to stargaze. It has also become a mecca for astrotourism, observe stars and night photography as the whole island has exceptional landscapes for this practice. If you are planning a trip to La Palma or anywhere else with dark skies and want to do nightscape photography, you need to be prepared. Here are the basics you need to know.

Recommended equipment for nightscape photography: preparation.

There is no room for improvisation when it comes to equipment for night photography. You must be well prepared, as night sessions usually take place in inaccessible or distant locations to avoid light pollution.

This is the equipment I recommend for night photography.

• Camera. The type of camera will depend on your budget as it is usually an expensive equipment. However, you will need a bright (fast) lens and a camera that allows at least 3200 ISO and long exposure. In general terms make sure the camera has: manual settings, RAW format, bulb mode, if possible full frame, noise reduction option and Live View mode (for manual focus).
• A wide-angle lens: 24mm, 14mm are ideal.
• A telephoto lens (if you want to photograph the moon).
• An Intervalometer.
• Warm, comfortable clothing and footwear.
• Spare batteries.
• A sturdy tripod.
• Memory cards.
• Camera backpack with different compartments (ideally waterproof).
• Headlamp, preferably red or white/red.
• Mobile phone with a charged battery.

Of course, once you have the right equipment, you need to know how to use it. It is best to start in the daytime, getting to know the camera settings (functions and changing parameters) and practising, as well as learning how to access and modify the menu and how to handle the camera in the dark. Other considerations are that it is best never to go alone to take pictures at night, simply for safety reasons.

What to photograph in the night sky?

Once you have your equipment, you need to plan what you are going to photograph – the Milky Way? constellations? It is vital to know what you want to photograph, as well as the time of night when you can do it. Photographing the winter sky is not the same as photographing the summer sky. Just as you can’t get the same results if there is a moon. Therefore, it is vital to have the right equipment and to have a basic knowledge of the sky to know where the Milky Way is and at what time you can see it, or how to find the North Star if you want to do a startrail for example. I recommend accessing the chosen location before sunset to prepare the best composition, make sure there are no obstacles or dangerous terrain.

Tips for nightscape photography.

• Knowing how to take advantage of moments of light. In landscape photography at night, there is hardly ever enough light, so a dim crescent moon or a small background light, such as a lighthouse, can completely change a night landscape. Also, in the dark, colours do not appear the same as they do during the day, so a dim light or illumination changes the landscape again.
• Changing perspective and angle
• RAW format photography
• Natural lighting. This goes for moon or sunset.
• Minimise ISO. A beginner’s mistake is to raise the ISO as high as possible. However cameras have their best dynamic range much lower, at 1600 ISO for example (do check the manual of your camera). And it is at this point that you get the best colours of the night sky.
• Take care of the composition.
• Know what hyperfocal is and know how to use it.
• Focus: The focus for stars is always the same for any given lens and is not necessarily the infinity. Focus in manual in liveview and once you have it tape the focus wheel. There is nothing worse than thinking your photos are in focus and coming home after a long night and your photos are unfocusses!
• The Golden Rule (combination of ISO, aperture and exposure time that it works best. See more on our following post).

Landscape night photography made in La Palma. Instagram: @lapalmastars.

More photo on our  Photo Gallery.

If you are interested in taking a specialised course in night landscape photography, we recommend the webinars of our partner Babak Tafreshi, National Geographic photographer and president of TWAN.

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The Roque de Los Muchachos Astrophysical Observatory on La Palma island is a prestigious research centre with one of the most advanced professional telescope arrays in the world. Here is a video with spectacular images of the night sky over La Palma and of the sky at the Observatorio de La Palma at night (see note below*). In the video you can see the William Herschel Telescope, the Gran Telescopio de Canarias and other smaller telescopes.

The Roque de Los Muchachos Astrophysical Observatory offers daytime visits to its facilities (Reservations: here) but night time visits are possible during working hours.

However, do not dispair as La Palma is a Dark Sky Reserve (an Starlight Reserve) and stargazing is possible on the whole island. Here is a list and map of the astronomy viewpoints and astronomical sites of interest if you wish to stargaze. But if you need a little bit more: explanations, use of telescopes and a guided tour of the sky, you may consider joining one of our astronomy tours.

More information about the Observatory on its official website: iac.es/orm

Video by Vikas Chandler. Observatory Roque de Los Muchachos (La Palma) at night.

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If you cannot come to La Palma to see the telescope in sittu or, while the visits to the Observatory are suspended due to the covid19, you can make the visit virtually in the video (language: Spanish). The video explains what the telescope does, how it works and what the real post-covid visits will be like.

More about Science at the Gran Telescopio de Canarias can be found on the official website: http://www.gtc.iac.es/

Visits to the  Observatory at Roque de Los Muchachos will resume in 2021. Information & bookings here. More information about the Observatory on the official website of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).

Video

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If you want to get the Observatory Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary Island of La Palma for a visit or just to enjoy the fantastic views, here we explain how to get to the Observatory. There is only an access road, the LP4 road, that goes from Santa Cruz de La Palma to the municipality of Garafía. This road is a mountain road as the Observatory is virtually on the highest point of the island, at an altitude of 2400m. From Santa Cruz on the LP4, there are 36 km of road of sinuous curves. However, the road is beautiful and offers spectacular views, but since it is a mountain road, you have to climb slowly and carefully. It usually takes between 1:15h to 1:30h to get up with a few minutes to rest and to take pictures.

The access by Garafía has a shorter patch on the lp4 road, but first you have to get to Garafía, on the north of the island via the LP1 road. From Los Llanos de Aridane to the Observatory, on the west of the island, it takes about 1:30h without traffic and, from Santa Cruz de La Palma, by the LP1 to Garafía and then to the Observatory (12 kms on the LP4) it takes approximately 2 hours (on the east of the island). Also the road is very beautiful. We recommend to access the Observatory via Lp4 road from Santa Cruz and then leave the observatory via Lp4-Garafía-Lp1 to Los Llanos or to Barlovento.

Once in the Observatory you may access the Roque de Los Muchachos summet (inside the National Park). This last stretch of road is open during the day. At night, the road is closed to the public.

If interested on a guided visit to the Observatory (mornings only) , please book in advance on the link (limited places) here.

For more information about the Observatory please access the official website here.

La entrada How to get to the Observatory in La Palma? se publicó primero en AstroLaPalma.

• the darkness of the island
• a stable atmosphere
• the low air and light pollution
• the observatory being above the cloud level for more than 300 days on a given year
• the sky of La Palma is also protected by law from 1989 (Law of the sky), enforcing the control of light pollution by regulating street lighting and air communication routes.

Visits to the Observatory can be booked here: Daytime Visits.

New telescopes at Observatory Roque Muchachos

The newest incorporation to the Observatory facilities in recent years are 23 Cherenkov telescopes which will be part of the International Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). La Palma will be the northern site for this network. The largest Cherenkov telescopes will have 23 m in diameter. In 2016, the fundation has been laid for the 3rd Cherenkov telescope in La Palma.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation ground-based observatory for gamma-ray astronomy at very-high energies. With more than 100 telescopes located in the northern and southern hemispheres, CTA will be the world’s largest and most sensitive high-energy gamma-ray observatory. This network will be capable of observing the whole of the sky, inside and outside our galaxy as it will have 120 telescopes between both hemispheres. It will also cover a very wide range of energies ranges from several dozen Gev to 100TeV (1 TeV = 1012 eV) seeking to understand the origin and role of relativistic cosmic particles, probe extreme environments and explore physics frontiers.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is very possibly another incorporation to the Observatory. It is planned to be located on Mauna Kea (Hawaii) but its construction has been temporarily halted due to protests by Native Hawaiian americans. In 2015, the State Supreme Court of Hawaii invalidated the TMT’s building permits and it is likely that the telescope cannot be built in Hawaii. Hence Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma is the alternative site. At the end of 2017, the final decision of the site for TMT will be decided.

The TMT is much larger than existing telescopes (although the E-ELT telescope is still bigger) and it is designed to observe from near ultraviolet to mid-infrarred (wavelength 0.31 to 28 μm). It also have adaptive optics which will help to correct errors caused by Earth´s atmosphere helping the telescope to reach its maximum resolution.

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The TNG is equipped with 3 instruments permanently installed in its foci and offers a variety of observing modes covering the optical and near-infrared spectrum, offering wide-field imaging up to high-resolution spectroscopy.

Its most relevant instrument is the HARPS-N “High Precision Radial Speed ​​Planter in the Northern Hemisphere. It is one of the most accurate spectrographs in the world that has the main objective of discovering and characterizing extrasolar planets the size of the Earth (Echelle spectrometer at 383-633 nm wavelengths and with spectral resolution of R = 115000). In practice HARPS-N measures the slight oscillation of the star caused by the presence of the planet (in m/s) with which it can estimate the mass of the exoplanets, their chemical composition and distance to the star.

History

The agreements for the construction of the telescope in La Palma were signed in 1979 and the telescope The telescope saw its “first light” in 1998. Until June 2004, the telescope was operated by the Galileo Galilei Genter, created in 1997 by the Consorzio Nazionale per l’Astronomia e l’Astrofisica (CNAA). From  July 27, 2004, the new Galileo Galilei Foundation, funded by the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), is responsible for the management of the TNG.

Results

The TNG is currently looking mainly for exoplanets, a very relevant field in astrophysics at the moment. The first exoplanet discovered by the TNG was the Kepler 78 b, a planet similar to Earth in size and mass but much hotter, surface temperature can reach 5,000 degrees. Another exoplanet also in the news, and found by the TNG (published May 2017), belongs to the star GJ625 (Gliese 625), a red dwarf close to the Sun, is in the area of ​​habitability, which means that could host lifetime. The Kepler 78b and the planet of GJ625 are some of the more than 1,000 already discovered exoplanets (Earth-like planets).

Curiosities

In February 2013, an international team, led by Spanish astrophysicists, characterized the 2012 asteroid DA14 using the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Galileo Nazionale Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma. They were able to measure the maximum approach to Earth.

In the TNG, all the rooms are kept at a certain temperature, which varies depending on the room. The telescope should be half a degree below the minimum outside temperature recorded the previous night to minimize the airflow around the telescope and avoid turbulence that greatly reduces the image quality caused by the temperature gradient when opening the telescope.

The second building, dome of the telescope is a structure of an approximate height of 26 m. And occupies an area of ​​about 400 m2. The building is entirely made of metal structure, with a fixed first floor, while the other 3 can rotate around the vertical axis of the building, in solidarity, in synchrony with the rotation of the telescope.

In the TNG, all the rooms are kept at a certain temperature, which varies depending on the room.. The telescope should be half a degree below the minimum outside temperature recorded the previous night to minimize the airflow around the telescope and avoid turbulence that greatly reduces the image quality caused by the temperature gradient when opening the telescope.

The second building, dome of the telescope is a structure of an approximate height of 26 m. And occupies an area of ​​about 400 m2. The building is entirely made of metal structure, with a fixed first floor, while the other 3 can rotate around the vertical axis of the building, in solidarity, in synchrony with the rotation of the telescope.

More about the other telescopes at the Observatory Roque de Los Muchachos can be found on the official web of the Observatory. Also here at Gran Telescopio de Canarias and William Herschel Telescope.

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Light pollution is defined as the introduction of artificial light to an ecosystem (into naturally dark situations), degrading its natural state with the emission of light of different intensities, directions, spectral range and/or unnecessarily varying a light/dark schedule (ie. having lights on a empty office building or streets lights on after certain times).

It is obvious that humans need and use artificial light during the night just…well…simply to live. But the use of artificial light should be in equilibrium with the nocturnal life, energy efficiency and health (avoiding the alteration of sleep patterns and the effect of artificial light at night on some cancers). We should try to minimize the impact of light pollution reducing the negative effects by designing better street lighting, scheduling of street lights, etc.

Light pollution increases the background brightness of the sky by reflecting and diffusion artificial light into the gases and particles in the air. This results in a reduction of visibility of the stars and other celestial objects.

The Sky Law in the Canary Islands (1989) controls gas emissions to the atmosphere on the island, as well as light pollution and air communications routes. The aim of the law is to have transparent and dark sky, with good (if not outstanding) quality for both amateur and professional astronomy. As a result, La Palma is a Dark Reserve (a Starlight Reserve) and thanks to this it has developed a Sustainable Tourism Industry based on the sky. There are many options for astrotourism in La Palma, we recommend you to enjoy the sky in one of our astronomy tours.

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What is the Milky Way?

The Milky Way is the galaxy in which Earth and the Solar System lies. It contains more than 200 000 million of stars and its diameter is estimated to be about 100 000 light-years (about 420 000 000 000 000 000 Km). From a dark location on Earth, we can only see a tiny part of our galaxy, only our neighbouring stars really. And only if you are on those dark locations you may be lucky enough to see the disk of the galaxy.

About 50 years ago, everybody was able to identify the Milky Way in the sky even if they did not know what it really was. Nowadays, due to light pollution, it is estimated than less of 70 % of Earth population in Europe or United States have ever seen the Milky Way. This is because, the light pollution has stolen the light of the stars. La Palma is still one of those few places on this planet from which the stars and dark sky are visible, even from populated towns. This is thanks to light pollution being controlled by law (Law of the sky, 1989). So, do come to La Palma! You now know that besides the beautiful landscapes and protected areas on the island, visitors can also enjoy the light of the stars. You can even try to reach them with the tips of your fingers!

If interested you may observe the Milky Way and the starry sky at one of the astronomical viewpoints or sites of astronomical interest on La Palma: Miradores astronómicos, or you can book one of our astronomy tours, where you can also see it through telescopes.

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