Mt John University Observatory

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Mt John University Observatory (way to the observatory area)
View to the south (plant below the summit)

The Mt John University Observatory (MJUO) is New Zealand's premier observatory. It was established in 1965 and is located on Mount John , 1029 meters above sea level in the northern part of the Mackenzie Basin on the South Island of New Zealand. The operator of the observatory is the University of Canterbury in Christchurch .

There are several telescopes on the premises of the observatory, including the HERCULES (" High Efficiency and Resolution Canterbury University Large Echelle Spectrograph ") and the MOA Telescope with a diameter of 1.8 meters. The MOA Telescope is the largest telescope in New Zealand. There is also a café and accommodation for researchers on the site.

In June 2012, the International Dark Sky Association declared an area of ​​430,000 hectares around the observatory to be a light reserve , the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve . Guided tours of the observatory are available from Lake Tekapo .

Telescopes

MOA telescope

This telescope was put into operation in December 2004. It is a New Zealand-Japanese joint project that was built in collaboration with the Universities of Canterbury, Aukland and Victoria and Nagoya University.

McLellan telescope

The McLellan telescope is a Dall-Kirkham reflector telescope with an aperture of 1.0 m and an aperture ratio of f / 7.7 or f / 18.5. Photometric analyzes are carried out via a CCD camera and the spectroscopy via optical fibers to the HERCULES spectrograph.

Boller & Chivens Telescope

This is a reflector telescope with a 61 cm aperture and an Apogee Alta CCD camera, with which the photometric analyzes are usually carried out. It works either with the f-number f / 13.5 or (less often) with f / 6.25.

Optical Craftsmen Telescope

This telescope is also a reflector telescope with an aperture of 61 cm. It has a fork mount and an aperture ratio of f / 16. In contrast to the Boller & Chivens telescope, the photometric analysis is carried out exclusively via CCD . It is currently being converted into a robotic telescope for automatic operation . It will then be incorporated into the AAVSO Robotic Telescope Network as the first AAVSO telescope in the southern hemisphere .

Earth and Sky Telescope

This telescope is not used for scientific purposes, but is available exclusively for tourists . It is equipped with a 40 cm Meade LX200 telescope.

Discoveries

In 2008, at one of its meetings , the American Astronomical Society announced that the smallest known planet outside our solar system had been found during the MOA-II survey. It was named MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb . The planet is in the constellation Sagittarius and orbits the brown dwarf MOA-2007-BLG-192L about 3,300 light-years from Earth .

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Paul Rincon: Tiniest extrasolar planet found (web) In: Astronomers have sighted the smallest extrasolar planet yet orbiting a normal star - a distant world just three times the size of our own . BBC News. June 2, 2008. Accessed January 2, 2014. (English)

Web links

Coordinates: 43 ° 59 ′ 12 ″  S , 170 ° 27 ′ 54 ″  E