Las Campanas Observatory

View from the Irénée-du-Pont telescope: On the hill on the left you can see the two Magellan telescopes, in front a lookout tower, behind it the Warsaw telescope and the 13-inch refractor, on the right the Henrietta Swope telescope

Front right the two Magellan telescopes, back left the Irénée du Pont telescope

The Las Campanas Observatory ( LCO ) is an astronomical observatory owned and directed by the Carnegie Institution for Science . It is located near La Serena in Chile . The location was chosen for the observatory because of its weather structure : with a height of 2,380 m, it is mostly above the clouds and offers 300 cloud-free days per year for exploring the sky.

The observatory houses a number of reflector telescopes . The largest instruments are the two Magellan telescopes with a mirror diameter of 6.5 m. There is also the "Irénée du Pont" with a mirror diameter of 2.5 m and the "Henrietta Swope" with 1.0 meters, named after Irénée du Pont or Henrietta Hill Swope . The latter is characterized by a large field of view of 2 °, which is achieved by a certain Ritchey-Chrétien arrangement with a relatively large 25 cm secondary mirror and a Gascoigne corrector .

The Giant Magellan Telescope is under construction and when completed it is expected to be the world's largest optical telescope.

The Irénée du Pont can be operated with the following instruments: