A minor diversion

A quick update from the weekend...

I had a friend over from England this weekend, and after seeing a Flamenco version of Carmen in London together on Thursday we flew back to Santiago on Friday to spend Saturday and Sunday exploring some of the Galician countryside.

Saturday we headed to the Praia das Catedrais, one of Galicia's best known coastal landmarks to see the caves on the beach. The weather was fantastic and it's well worth a visit if you're on the North coast of this province.

On the way there we passed through Lugo and stopped off at the local farmer's market where they had a stunning selection of olives - indeed by far the best I've had in Spain. I thought I bought enough to last me the week, but I appear to be mistaken.

Sunday we headed to the West coast, between Pontevedra and Vigo to spend a few hours on the beach relaxing. In general I'm terrible at just sitting down and not doing anything at the sea, but I managed a good quarter of an hour of sunbathing before I had to get up and wonder around.

We were there with a few friends including a capoeira teacher who gave us an impressive display:

before we headed for the lighthouse nearby, overlooking the Isla de Cies to watch the sunset:

We headed back on Sunday evening to try and catch the meteor shower though even the darkest spots in Santiago seem to have too much light pollution.

For now I'll leave this little bit of info for those around Galicia: Take a look out on Monday night at around 22.00 for the ISS which will be flying directly overhead and will have a visual magnitude of -2.3. Take a look here for the path and times.

Photos from CERN

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, we were lucky enough to go the 100m down into the chamber for the CMS detector. I got a few pictures while we were there.

First of all, on the surface before going into the cavern and indeed all around the CERN sites you see huge gas tanks. These tanks are for storing helium. The detectors and accelerator have to be cooled to just above absolute zero (there are superconducting magnets for the accelerator which only work at very low temperatures). If there is a problem with any of the components they may have to be taken apart, or at least looked at in detail. In order to do this, the helium will be released and the parts will warm back up. CERN has the largest supply of helium in the world and this is both expensive stuff and not easy to produce. It is still being produced now in order that they have a large enough supply. So, when you release the helium you want to store it somewhere, not just let it off into the atmosphere, and that is what these enormous tanks are for. The circumference of the tanks is, I guess, around 2 or 3 meters.

100m down into the cavern and we were lucky enough to see the last two pieces of the CMS detector being readied to slot into place. The following panorama is from 6 shots, which don't go together perfectly, but give a pretty good impression of the complexity of the detector:

The largest component of the CMS detector weighs in at 2000 tonnes. Your average crane cannot carry this sort of weight and so in order to lower it into the cavern they had to construct a specially designed pulley system. The two towers on top of the CMS building housed the wheels for this pulley. In the background of this picture is Mont Blanc:

Mont Blanc can be seen more clearly in this picture which I took as we were taking the bus to the site. The new polarising filter for my camera works very well at removing the reflections from the glass in the bus. the extreme blue in the sky in the picture of the helium tanks also comes from using a polarising filter which helps to remove any haze:

See here for a couple more from the detector.