At 20:30 on the warm evening of 10th January we, along with about 25 other people jumped into a shuttle bus to take us up into the hills to the Mamalluca Observatory. Built to allow the general public to gaze through telescopes into the night sky.

This part of the world has the clearest skies, and as a result a vast number of professional observatories from many countries are located here to do their research. This is the only one in the area were you can look for youself. The big ones high up on the mountains (the biggest being the VLT which mean Very Large Telescope!) would cost you 100 Euros per second to use, and you have to be a professional to even be allowed access. Consider if you wanted to use this for only 1 hour.....360000 Euros!

Luckly for us the Mamalluca cost us only about 16 pounds!

So we got up to the observatory and the sun was setting over the valley. We met our Astronomer guide who immediately pointed out Venus and Jupiter in the night sky. We were all very impressed seeing these 2 small but bright points of light in the clear sky, but before we knew it we were in the observatory dome with an impressed 40cm Telescope (thats 40cm wide lens)

After some cool automated adjustments and some even cooler rotation of the dome above us. We all took it in turns to look into the telescope to see Jupiter.

Now this was very impressive indeed. In the telescope you see Jupiter about the same size we see the Moon here on earth. Bear in mind that this planet is on average 483 million miles away we could see the stripes and red spot very clearly and even see 3 of its moons, amazing!!

Next stop was Venus which we were all surprised how incredibly bright it was, you could not look at it for long without hurting your eyes. This was also super impressive.

Then the telescope was pointed to the middle of the three stars in the sword of Orions belt. Just a point of light in the sky but through our telescope is was 4 stars clustered together surrounded by a massive (super massive) cloud of gas. This was a gas nebula, the birth place of new stars......now this was super super super impressive!

After this we all went outside to check out the sky with our own eyes, we were taught a number of constellations, showed us the red giant star Betelguese, located 640 lightyears away and has the distinction as being the most likely candidate to go Supernova. Then we looked through some other cool telescopes at even cooler stars and galaxies. Then shown a film about the universe.

After all that your two faithful travellers were left rather speechless and headed back to their comfy beds happy to have witnessed some truely awe inspiring stuff.

If anyone is feeling generous, Dave would like a proper (and no doubt expensive) telescope for his birthday.......