Astrophysicists from Masaryk University have shown the first photos of the southern night sky taken by the observing telescope that the university has installed at the Boyden Observatory in South Africa. In collaboration with colleagues from South Africa's Free State University, they prepared the observatory for the telescope in recent months, completed its installation and started testing it a few days ago. The telescope can be operated remotely and will be used by Brno scientists and students.
In the southern hemisphere, it is possible to observe with the naked eye not only objects in our galaxy, but also two neighbouring galaxies, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. With the telescope, astronomers will be able to observe objects in our Galaxy and objects up to millions of light years away in the nearest neighbouring galaxies. The telescope, located at Boyden Observatory, will allow measurements of the brightness of stars and how they change. The targets of the observations will be selected variable stars, star clusters or transits of exoplanets through their parent stars.
The Celestron CGE 1400 XLT telescope, which has been housed at the Brno Observatory and Planetarium, set off for South Africa with all its accessories at the beginning of April. "The telescope has a mirror diameter of 35 cm, will be operated in semi-automatic mode from the Czech Republic and will be used to obtain new photometric data for the objects studied, especially multiple occultation systems, chemically peculiar stars, exoplanets. It will also be used for subsequent additional observations of the PLATO satellite," described the use of the telescope astrophysicist Miloslav Zejda from the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University. "In bad weather, the roof of the observatory automatically closes itself," Zejda added.
The Boyden Observatory is located 26 kilometres east of Bloemfontein. In addition to its role as an astronomical research station, Boyden Observatory is also a Science Education Centre under the auspices of the University of the Free State and other donors.
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