This week, CTAO Managing Director, Stuart McMuldroch, and Construction Programme Manager, Volker Heinz, traveled to the Canary Islands for a productive visit with the hosting partners at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and colleagues from the CTAO Large-Sized Telescope (LST) Collaboration. The team was warmly welcomed at the IAC Headquarters in Tenerife by IAC Director, Valentín Martínez, marking the first official meeting between the two directors since Valentín recently assumed this role. Hosted by Ramón García López, Principal Investigator of the CTAO group at the IAC, the

The IACTEC headquarters has recently hosted the meeting between the engineering team behind the future European Solar Telescope and an international panel composed of some of the world's leading experts in the development of large telescopes and solar observation instrumentation. It is common for major scientific projects to undergo this type of scrutiny during their development as a way to independently verify their quality and viability. The evaluation process began over a month ago with the submission of all the design documentation to the reviewers. In this case, the evaluation focused

On Wednesday 30 October, the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) received a talk by the first Swiss astronaut, Claude Nicollier, who wanted to share his experience in space with the personnel of the IAC. Claude Nicollier is the first Swiss astronaut to have flown into space. After his studies at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, Claude joined ESA as a member of their first group of astronauts. Since 2007 Nicollier has been a Professor at the Federal Polytechnical School at Lausanne. He has spent more than 1000 hours in space (more than 42 days) including a