ASA is building telescopes in the Atacama Desert, Chile

A couple of years ago, we signed a contract with ASA Astrosysteme, an Austrian company renowned for their telescope-building expertise. That marked the beginning of a long-term partnership between ASA and Araucaria, with the aim of installing new telescopes at the Observatory Cerro Murphy (OCM) in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

Fast forward to 2022, and now we are proud owners of three new telescopes, produced and delivered by ASA:

• ASA600, an 0.6-m telescope, named by us WK06 to honor our colleague Wojtek Krzemiński
• AZ800, an 0.8-m telescope, named by us ZB08 to honour our colleague Zbigniew “Zibi” Kołaczkowski
• AZ1500, a1.5-m telescope, named by us JK15 to honour our colleague Janusz Kałużny

The telescopes are equipped with Andor iKon cameras, and JK15 is additionally connected to a high resolution spectrograph. In other words, we are getting ready for high-impact scientific observations. What will we observe? Stay tuned for our results!

Have a look at the photos documenting the process – it wasn’t always pretty, but sure it was worth it!