The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will be organizing, in La Palma, the meeting “Dark and quiet skies for science and society” between the 3rd and 7th of October 2021. This meeting is the continuation of the online workshop with the same name, which brought together, a year ago, about a thousand researchers from throughout the world to campaign for the natural darkness of the night sky. The congress “Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society” is backed by UNOOSA, the

Last Saturday the International Centre for Heritage Conservation (CICOP, the initials of its name in Spanish) awarded the International Prize for the Conservation and Protection of the astronomical quality of the Canary sky to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for its contribution to the preservation of the darkness and transparency of the sky over the Islands via the Canary Observatories and the Technical Office for the Protection of the Sky (OTPC), which offer protection against light and radio wave pollution atmospheric contamination: a contribution which is exceptional

Three organizations have today agreed to work jointly to ensure that the island will be the next host to the Starmus Festival, an international multidisciplinary event which unites science, art, and music. The president of the Cabild of La Palma, Mariano Zapata, the councillor for Culture and Historic Heritage, Jovita Monterrey, the Director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Rafael Rebolo, and the director and founder of the Starmus Festival, Garik Israelian met today in Santa Cruz de La Palma and agreed to continue collaborating so that the next edition of the Starmus

At the heart of almost every sufficiently massive galaxy there is a black hole whose gravitational field, although very intense, affects only a small region around the centre of the galaxy. Even though these objects are thousands of millions of times smaller than their host galaxies our current view is that the Universe can be understood only if the evolution of galaxies is regulated by the activity of these black holes, because without them the observed properties of the galaxies cannot be explained.

The pre-optics for HARMONI, the optical and infrared spectrograph to be installed on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) at Cerro Armazones (Chile), has passed successfully the test of the optomechanical design produced by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The instrument will now proceed to the Final Design Phase, prior to the start of the building of the instrument for this telescope of 39 metres in diameter, the largest project in optical and infrared astronomy of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).