Lohrmann Institute

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Lohrmann observatory in the Beyer building
The Lohrmann Observatory in 1953

The Lohrmann Institute for Geodetic Astronomy was an institute of the Technical University of Dresden named after the German geodesist and astronomer Wilhelm Gotthelf Lohrmann (1796-1840) . It was founded in 1961. Since the institute was abolished in 1968, it has been called the Lohrmann Observatory and is also the professorship for astronomy at the TU Dresden. His focus is on geodetic astronomy, celestial mechanics and astrometry .

The professorships of the institute were:

Part of the Beyer building erected in 1913 on the edge of the campus is a striking observatory tower that has an observatory dome about 40 meters above street level . The main instrument is a 30 cm Heyde refractor. The observatory tower also houses a collection of historical astronomical and geodetic instruments.

The namesake Wilhelm Gotthelf Lohrmann was also the co-founder and head of the Technical Educational Institute (1828), the forerunner of today's TU Dresden. The observatory has the observatory code 040 with the International Astronomical Union (IAU) .

Due to the unfavorable urban observation conditions, a branch was gradually set up in Gönnsdorf from the 1960s. In 2007 the new observatory on the Triebenberg went into operation. The observatory code C01 is assigned to the Triebenberg branch . The main instrument there is an automatic 60 cm Newtonian telescope with a Peltier-cooled, 16-megapixel CCD detector. Visual observations are not possible with this setup. The city observatory is still intended for this. Mainly the position determination of asteroids and transit photometry of exoplanets is carried out at the Triebenberg observatory .

In autumn 2017 the Triebenberg branch was closed, and with it the observatory.

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Coordinates: 51 ° 1 '47.5 "  N , 13 ° 43' 44.8"  E