Our guide meets you at a viewpoint on the TF-38, inside Teide National Park, at almost 2,000 metres above sea level. You are welcomed with a glass of sparkling wine and taken to the best spot for the view, where you watch the sun go down onto the sea of clouds that sits below the park. Your guide explains the volcanic landscape around you — the lava fields and mineral colours that shift from ochre to deep red in the last half hour of light. You reach the meeting point in your own car.

After sunset you follow the group in your own car to a second site on the TF-21, deeper inside the park. Accredited professional astronomers guide the observation through a 500 mm (20-inch) Sky-Watcher Stargate GoTo telescope: galaxies, globular clusters and nebulae, the cloud bands of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn. A digital eyepiece puts the same view on a screen, where deep-sky objects appear in colour.