News Archive

The Canary Islands have been among the legendary places of humanity since ancient times. During one of the many adventurous voyages of the Middle Ages, the Irish Saint Brendan (10th century), found the real Earthly Paradise in the Canaries, then known as the Fortunate Islands. There, no evil could be imagined and all sort of delicious fruits were at hand. An anonymous, 15th century Italian description of the voyage also says that “molto si maravigliavano e vedevano per lo cielo molto meglio le stelle che non si può vedere in altra parte, e vedevano li setti pianeti andare per lo cielo man…

TO THE OBSERVERS   From today 8th November 2011, after having finished the maintenace to the mechanics that control M3, the users are able to change the Nasmyth station during the night.

TO THE OBSERVERS From 24th October 2011 until further notice the possibility to change Nasmyth station during the night is NOT offered. We are sorry for the inconvenience and are working to solve the problem as soon as possible. Thank you for comprehension.

Another image documenting the first observations with ARNICA at the TNG. A section of the reflection nebula NGC 2023 observed in the S0->1 H2 emission line.

On December 18, 1998, "First Light" with ARNICA. This image shows one of the first images, the Butterfly Nebula (NGC2346), observed in the line of the S0->1 transition of molecular hydrogen.

On December 10, 1998 OIG (Optical Imager of Galileo) saw "First Light". During this night, the commissioning team were able to obtain images of various astronomical objects, one of which is shown here: the starburst galaxy NGC 2903, a beautiful spiral in Leo.

An image of planet Jupiter, taken with the tracking camera in August 1998. Io satellite is casting its shadow the planet disc near the Great Red Spot. Ganimede is also visible on the left.

In the evening of June 6 1998 TNG successfully achieved "First Light". During this night, a number of astronomical exposures were made with the tracking camera, that served to evaluate telescope performances. This image shows the Epsylon-Lyrae 1 binary system, taken in B band with 10 sec exposure. Seeing is 0.8".

Rocky material of planetary origin falling on its parent stars and changing its chemical composition: this is the first result of the italian extra solar planet search project, in progress at Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (Canary Islands), using the high resolution spectrograph SARG. The targets are solar-type stars in wide binary systems (separation of a few hundreds of astronomical units). The study of chemical composition of the first six pairs has revealed one system (HD 219542) characterized by strong differences between the components. This is an unexpected result, since the two stars we…