We at Stargazing Tenerife have the privilege to work in the beautiful national park and forests of Mount Tiede. Our guides have either obtained the status of Starlight monitor or are actively working towards gaining that qualification very shortly. A starlight monitor is a qualification issued by the Starlight foundation which is part of the Instituto Astronomia de Canarias or the IAC . the IAC is the government body that runs the observatories both at Izana in Tenerife and the Roque de Muchachos in La Palma. These are both important observatories for the study of the solar system and deep space.
Part of the duties of a starlight monitor is caring for the environment and we take this responsibility seriously each night making sure people respect the National park. Unfortunately not every visitor of the National park has the same level of care as we do. So periodically we organise a clean up of the Miradors where we along with all other stargazing excursions do their sunset and stargazing nights. Our latest clean up took place a few days ago at the Mirador de Los Poleos where we along with other stargazing groups watch the sunset over the island of El Hierro La Gomera and la Palma.
We offer a free VIP excursion to a couple of local volunteers in exchange for a hour of help along with myself on this occasion our mission was to clean up the many hundreds of cigarette butts that have accumulated over the past few months left by careless smokers at the Mirador. This was going to be a hard work as the cigarette butts are even stuffed between the joints of the rock walls and the ones discarded on the floor were equally difficult to sweep up to be collected in our dustpan because the uneven cobblestone of the floor.
So I picked up our two volunteers an hour earlier then usual and after a lovely drive up through the Corona forest with both my guests and coworkers admiring the natural habitat and with me explaining a bit about the local fauna and flora we arrived at the Mirador and with our new brooms and metal buckets and dustpans we set about the task with enthusiasm happy in the knowledge that our hour of hard work would make a difference to the overall appearance of our workplace. Below there are photos of the Mirador de los Poleos before and after our hour of hard work and our two volunteer guests in action.
The two volunteers worked hard and we managed to make the place 99% free of cigarette butts for the next month or two at least.
Their reward started with a glass of sparkling Spanish wine Cava while they watched the beautiful sunset over La Palma. After the sunset we along with the other guests on the VIP excursion headed on up 8 km higher to the mirador at Samara.
Our two guides Mike and Dani set up their two large telescopes and I made myself useful by setting up one of or Seestar S50 combined telecope and camera which we use to show VIP guests astrophotography of deepsky objects.
We managed to get images of three galaxies M81 M82 the Bodes and cigar galaxies and M51 the whirlpool galaxy images which are also shown below.
The two volunteers also had the full VIP excursion with Dani and Mike explaining why Tenerife is one of the best places in the world to do stargazing and both giving a detailed guide to the stars constellations planets and other deepsky objects on view that night.
The highlight of their night was a beautiful photo taken under the stars using astrophotography technique to highlight their faces with a dark star studded sky behind them. I think our two volunteers had a lovely time and we thanked them for their hard work and I gave them a ride back down to their home in Fanabe Adeje,
