Startrails in the Canaries

A few months ago I decided to look through my images from the Canary islands that I took during the past couple of years and make a few star trails out of them. Below are the selected four: 

The western view from the INT 2.5m telescope terrace. Moon, Venus and Jupiter are the three brightest streaks in the image. An observer's car illuminates the road in red. 

Mount Teide reigns in the left part of the image, while Venus and Jupiter set in the early twilight. For the cities below, the night has already arrived and the street lights illuminate the clouds from below. 

Back to the island of La Palma, the MAGIC telescopes scan the skies for Cherenkov light cones, while the Moon high in the sky illuminates the landscape. 

The final set of trails comes from near the top of the Teide Volcano in Tenerife. I love how the road is visible due to the (very few) passing cars and how a little bolide (at least -5m!) decided to show up near the lower right of the image. 

Celestial highway

Planets wander on the sky on their own highway: the zodiacal band. Even dust in the solar system is somewhat confined to this plane and you can see it here as a lighter conical region in the middle of the image. Sometimes the planets and the Moon catch up in meetings as beautiful as this one:

Moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction

Sitting on the caldera edge of the Taburiente supervolcano in the Atlantic ocean, a true photon feast!