Julissa Reynoso, US Ambassador to Spain, together with other members of her team, visited yesterday the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, accompanied by Rafael Rebolo, Director of the IAC. During their tour of the facilities, they were briefed on the various research programmes and technology projects under development. They also received a dossier on all the ongoing collaborations with US research centres and possible projects still under negotiation, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

The results obtained from the over two hundred photometers put in place by the Interreg EELabs project during the past four years have been used to evaluated the impact of artificial night lighting on the night-time ecosystems of the achipelagos, especially on sea birds, but also to make the local people aware of this type of contamination. In Macaronesia (the collective name for the Atlantic Islands comprising the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde), natural night-time darkness is preservedonly in highly isolated natural reserves, such as the islands of Corvo and Graciosa (the

For the second year, the Teide Observatory has hosted the "MIT Astronomy Field Camp", a prestigious camp offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), considered one of the best and most influential universities in the world, to its students of of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). Through this experience, the institution provides students with the opportunity to live and work in a professional astronomical observatory while developing real research projects. This work is often expanded into final theses or articles in leading scientific journals. For three weeks