GTCdigital

"One, two, three..." I counted them again (I was so nervous!). One two... twelve! Then all the separate reflections were brought together into one. We had done it! We had produced First Light . Read this article

Scene II
Gaspar to Balthazar
“May God save you Sir, are you an Astronomer?”
In the second half of the 12th century a short play called the Drama of the Three Wise Men (El Auto de los Reyes Magos) was written by an anonymous author, who was probably a monk. The play is thought to be one of the first written in the language that we know today as Castilian Spanish. Read this article

A new step. A new challenge that will take a lot of time and effort. The first pieces of the telescope structure are arriving at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos, on the island of La Palma, from the construction firm's factory in Tarragona. Read this article

Sizes and measurements are all well and good but they are often difficult to visualise without making comparisons: a wood the size of ten football pitches, a vehicle as heavy as a fully grown elephant, a bug as small as a pinhead...there are endless examples of how dimensions can be made more meaningful. Read this article

Forecasting climate conditions is an essential part of telescope control because of the impact they have on data quality. The Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) has a meteorological station of its own, even though there are three others at telescopes in the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, so that forecasts can be generated independently and because the steepness of the terrain means that conditions can change at different locations. Read this article