LOOKING TO THE SKIES
Canary Islands takes off as astronomy hub.
Way, way out in the Atlantic Ocean, at a point where one of Earth’s four cold water currents meets the searing African desert winds, nights are dark as prehistory. Once the sun sets on the volcanic archipelago known as the Canary Islands, a misty net of extraterrestrial white light blankets the sky from horizon to horizon. Until dawn, every ray of visible starlight in the entire northern hemisphere and much of the southern hemisphere gathers overhead. That sprawl of sky over a small island speck on the black ocean suggests, like few other experiences, the nanosecond that is human life.
Such black nights and clear skies have beckoned astronomers to install some of the world’s most powerful telescopes on volcanic peaks in this archipelago off the northwestern coast of Africa. As scientists use these state-of-the-art observatories to search out signs of the Big Bang, at sea level 8,000 feet below, tens of thousands of mostly British vacationers are getting drunk and sunburned.
Five million tourists annually visit this Spanish territory to bask in Europe’s only subtropical weather. The port at Tenerife, the largest island, is the third-mostvisited cruise ship destination in Europe.
Behemoth floating parties disgorge thousands of passengers daily in wintertime, the high season. Only a small percentage of tourists make the two-hour nauseating ascent to the telescopes perched at the windy top of Mount Teide.
That may be about to change. Astrotourism is already a component of the Canaries’ booming tourism industry, drawing about 200,000 visitors annually. But with the 2014 designation of the islands as part of a larger EU SkyRoute itinerary for visitors, and the creation in 2011 of a music and astronomy festival, Canarian officials believe more star trekkers will soon be taking the winding drive up the mountain.
Island officials and the Spanish government are trying to cement the islands’ reputation as a key destination for both amateur and professional astronomers. In 2007, scientists and policymakers from some 50 countries met on the smaller island of La Palma for the first International Conference in Defense of the Quality of the Night Sky, producing a declaration on “protecting the sky as a basic right for all humanity.”
The Canary Islands telescope sites are run by astronomers at the Institute of Astrophysics in Tenerife, a local research organization that operates the European Northern Observatory. The islands have also hosted telescopes from 28 nations over the last few decades.
La Palma, population 70,000, is home to a large colony of scientists and the remnants of a 1960s German commune, and it is also a tiny center for astrotourism. The economy revolves around astronomy, and besides the telescope and research center, there are 13 sky-viewing points on La Palma.
Tenerife’s astrotourism lure was bumped up in the past few years with the Starmus Festival, headlined by the likes of the late U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong and other stars of the space world. In the fall of 2014, in a vast conference hall in the Ritz Carlton’s Abama resort, Garik Israelian, a Canarian astrophysicist, stood before 600 science aficionados from all over the world, with music from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” blasting from speakers all around.
Everyone had their iPhones aimed at the wheelchair mounted with a black Intel laptop that almost obscured the figure of physicist Stephen Hawking.
Hawking, along with Brian May of the band Queen, who earned a doctorate in physics from the Canary Islands astrophysical institute, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and several astronauts, was among the headliners at the second Starmus Festival in 2014, the pet
project of Israelian.
Israelian is a rocker-scientist who had his own punk band and studied astrophysics in Armenia before emigrating to Spain with his family in the 1970s. He moved to Tenerife and began researching supernovas at the observatories.
The islands are essential to extraterrestrial exploration now, but they played a key role in earthly exploration as well. Columbus “discovered” them in 1492, that banner year in the human enterprise of looking beyond. Drifting down the coast of Africa before steering west to discover the Americas, the explorer dropped anchor and fueled up on fresh water and fruit here.
The islands were not exactly new to mainland Europeans when Columbus arrived. The origin of their name is the Latin word for dog — cane — possibly because, as ancient Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote, early Roman visitors to the islands encountered huge dogs. The small tropical birds we call canaries, native to these islands and others, are named after the islands — not the other way around.
But when Columbus dropped anchor, the islands were still inhabited by a tall, white-skinned people called the Guanches.
Within two years of the explorer’s stopover, the Spaniards had colonized the islands and eradicated the Guanche, selling the survivors as white slaves on the Continent.
For modern-day American visitors, the Canary Islands resemble the Caribbean but possess facilities and characteristics of Europe — hospitals, low crime, relatively high standard of living, Spanish culture and healthy, delicious food. But the chief difference between Tenerife and, say, Aruba or the Bahamas is the island’s role in international space endeavors.
Israelian plans a third, even larger Starmus festival from June 27 to July 2 this year devoted to discussion of the search for life in the universe.
“The only place and best place to do something like this is here,” he said.