Tenerife, Canary Islands, April 19, 2010, 1:00am: Saturn has been...

Tenerife, Canary Islands, April 19, 2010: a small team of Suffolk University students huddles tensely around the CCD camera control computer on the 0.5-m telescope of the Teide Observatory, 2500 m (8,200 ft) above sea level at a dark-sky site located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km (60 miles) west of the Western Sahara.

The Mons Telescope at the Teide Observatory

Will the sky remain clear? Is the shutter open? Are all the instrument settings correct? Will they be able to find Neptune and determine its atmospheric composition by spectral analysis? Is that source next to the planet a satellite or a background star?

Mount Teide, the world’s third largest volcano

This is not a scene from a postgraduate thesis project, but from a science for non-science majors undergraduate course at Suffolk University Madrid Campus, in collaboration with the Spanish IAC, to give non-science major students a first-hand experience of observing with the latest equipment at a large professional observatory.

Lord of the Rings: planet Saturn (April 2009)

On April 18th, students enrolled in the Science-for-non-Science-Majors course "Astronomy I: the Solar System" (SCI 111) will travel to the Canary Islands to complete a four nights Astronomy Lab at the European Northern Observatory. The science/adventure field trip includes 36 hours of astronomical observations with the Mons Telescope, climbing the world’s third largest volcano (Mount Teide, 12,198 ft), and exploring the Parque Nacional del Teide (named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO on June 29th, 2007).

The Blue World: planet Neptune + satellite Triton and background star (June 2009)

Primary targets for this observation run are the planets, their satellites and, of course, comet hunting.