index.html.en - index.html.en

OCA Observatory in Chile

The Observatorio Cerro Armazones (OCA) observatory in its current state is located at 24° 35′ 55″ south, 70° 12′ 06″ west, 2808 m.a.s.l. It is a bit westwards of the original Observatorio de Cerro Armazones (24° 35′ 53″ south, 70° 11′ 47″ west, 2715 m.a.s.l.), which was founded in 1995 by the Universidad Católica del Norte  (UCN) This is 1.3 km southwest of the site for the ELT of the European Southern Observatory (ESO - Austria is member since 2009), which is located at the main summit (24° 35′ 22″ south, 70° 11′ 30″ west, 3057 m.a.s.l.). The hill is often called Cerro Murphy. It was installed by the Astronomisches Institut der Ruhr Universität Bochum (RUB) in 2006 and jointly used with UCN thereafter. In 2010 ESO decided to use the summit for building the ELT and the region was handed over to ESO by the Chilean government. The observatory got in a contract the status of a so-called "national telescope" within ESO. In 2020/2021 it was finally transferred in a collaboration contract between RUB, ESO, and the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CAMK PAN) to the Warsaw group.

As of October 2019, our rector signed a collaboration agreement with the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CAMK PAN) to be a partner in the project to fund the refurbishing of the BESO spectropraph. Originally designed for the Hexapod telescope it was mainly operated at the RUB IRIS 80cm telescope. It is nearly an identical copy of the Fiber-fed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph (FEROS) at ESO in LaSilla. It was, besides many studies about the multiplicity of stars at the upper main sequence by the RUB group, also used to investigate the climate situation here near the ELT site by our team (seel Lakicevic et al 2017). Now it has been moved from the RUB 80cm in the meanwhile to a climatized room beside the new 1.5 m telescope constructed by AstroSystemeAustria (ASA).
Besides the refurbishing work, the required investments were funded by the 2019/2020 funds of the Schwerpunkt Physik.
After major delays due to the pandemic situation, the system is expected to be operational in autumn 2023.

 The Panorama view :

Looking back into the mirror the Cerro Paranal with the 4 x 8.2m telescopes - looking forward to the ELT 39.5m construction site