Pulkovo Observatory
The Pulkovo Observatory - Russian Пу́лковская астрономи́ческая обсервато́рия , English Pulkovo Space Observatory - is the most famous observatory in Russia and has long been the main observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences . It is located on Pulkovo Hill , 18 kilometers south of the center of Saint Petersburg .
instrumentation
The observatory was founded in 1839 under Tsar Nikolaus I and received a main instrument with a 38 cm lens, a further development of the famous Munich Fraunhofer lenses, which was then considered a giant telescope . In 1886, with the 30-inch refractor, she surpassed the hitherto largest lens telescope in the world in the Vienna University Observatory .
The high geographical latitude (like Oslo only 6½ ° from the Arctic Circle) allowed observations that could not be carried out by more southern observatories such as the Royal Greenwich Observatory . Pulkowo was the position of the world longitude determination in 1933 (local time difference to Greenwich 2h 01m 18,57s) and in 1990 it was included in the list of the world cultural and natural heritage of mankind by UNESCO .
The Pulkowo Observatory is a historically important research facility, which was partially re-equipped after 1945, u. a. with a radio telescope . Important astronomers such as the German Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve , his son Otto Wilhelm Struve and Paul Harzer worked on their instruments, which were mostly made in Germany .
Founding history
The observatory was built in 1839 on a wooded hill with a panoramic view from above. The hill with the village of Pulkawa at its feet was designed as a park in order to make the loneliness of the astronomers as impassable as possible at a distance of 15 km from the capital through loving care for all the needs of the astronomers . The observatory area including the park covers about 0.7 × 1 km and is accessed by the highway to Moscow (Pulkowskoje or Moskowskij Prospect), which evades in an eastern arc.
As Russia's future main observatory, Pulkowo was equipped with the most modern equipment at the time as early as 1839. The large refractor , with a 38 cm aperture, was the brightest lens telescope in the world for about 10 years . The first director was the Baltic German Friedrich Wilhelm Struve , who had previously set up the Dorpat observatory . The architect was Alexander Brullov .
The main task of the observatory was to determine the position of the stars ( astrometry ), the study of binary stars and the exact determination of astronomical constants such as the precession motion of the earth , nutation and stellar aberration . In the years 1845, 1865, 1885, 1905 and 1930 own star catalogs were published.
In addition, the data obtained in Pulkovo served the state survey of Russia as well as for the purpose of navigation and geographic research. Thus one was involved in the exact determination of the longitude and latitude from the Danube to the Arctic Ocean (until 1851) and the surveying of the island of Spitzbergen (1899-1901). The Pulkovo Meridian , which runs through the center of the main building, was the starting point for all older maps of Russia.
The Russian Geographical Society owes its establishment (1845) largely to the observatory. From Pulkowo, Wilhelm von Struve also organized the completion of the Struve-Bogen , a 3000 km long surveying line for the determination of geoids in Eastern Europe (1816 to 1852), the planning of which he had started at the Dorpat observatory .
History up to World War II
In 1862, Struve's son Otto Wilhelm took over the management of the institute. In 1888, Aristarch Belopolski , an expert in the field of spectroscopy and solar research , moved from the Moscow observatory to Pulkovo.
In 1889, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, an astrophysics laboratory was set up and a refractor with a 76 cm aperture was installed (again the world's largest telescope).
In 1890 Fyodor Bredichin became director. Under his leadership, astrophysics became a research focus. With the installation of a astrographs to 1894 began in Pukowo with astrophotography . In 1904 a "zenith telescope" was set up to measure the movement of the celestial pole . From 1920 onwards, the observatory sent out precise time signals using radio waves . In 1923 a spectrograph was set up after Littrow . In 1940 a solar telescope was put into operation in the south of the area .
In order to be able to observe the southern stars, two branches were set up, the Simejis observatory on the Crimean peninsula (in today's Yalta district of Simejis ) and the Nikolayev observatory .
The great terror of the Stalin era marked a deep turning point in research activities. Many employees, including the then director Boris Gerasimowitsch , were arrested and executed in the late 1930s. This later became known as the Pulkovo Affair . Scientists, such as Dmitri Jeropkin , were accused by special troika courts of the NKVD of involvement in the terrorist fascist Trotsky Zinoviev organization founded by the German secret service to overthrow the government of the Soviet Union and establish a fascist dictatorship on Soviet soil in 1932 has been. The exact number of victims of this Pulkovo affair could not be determined. The victims included not only scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory, but also astronomers , geologists , geophysicists , geodesists and mathematicians in various scientific institutes in Leningrad, Moscow and other cities.
During the Second World War , the observatory was completely destroyed by German air raids and artillery fire. Under dramatic circumstances, the main instruments of the main observatory, including the large lens telescope with an objective diameter of 76 cm, could be relocated to Leningrad and thus escaped destruction and destruction. The same applied to a large part of the world-famous library holdings with their extremely rare manuscripts and books from the 15th to 19th centuries, as well as fundamental works in the field of practical astronomy and geodesy. However, due to an arson on February 5, 1997, about 1500 of the 3852 volumes were completely burned. The other volumes were also damaged, either by the flames or the water used to extinguish the fire.
Younger story
Before the end of the war, the Soviet government decided to rebuild the observatory and to add equipment and personnel to the previous facility. Construction work began in 1946 under the direction of the director Alexander A. Michailow (director until 1964), and it reopened in May 1954.
The radio astronomy department and an optical- mechanical workshop for instrument making were new . Equipment that survived the war was repaired and put back into operation. New telescopes were a 65 cm refractor , a large zenith telescope , two interferometers , two solar telescopes , a coronograph and a large radio telescope .
The observatory in Simejis was attached to the Crimean observatory in 1945 , and another observatory was built in Kislovodsk .
The current director of the main observatory is Alexander V. Stepanov , advisor to the Academy of Russia's most famous astronomer, Viktor Kuzmich Abalakin . Annually, the scientists of the observatory publish 5–10 works, as well as specialist books and numerous magazine articles, including current reports on discoveries. For example, the explosion of a supernova in a distant galaxy was reported on the 19th / 20th , a phenomenon that is only observed approximately every 30 years.
The observatory also houses part of the academy's astrophysical laboratory and the only earthquake research station in northwestern Russia . In the 1970s , the observatory developed a photographic meridian circle to determine high-precision star locations.
literature
- Vera Ichsanova: Pulkovo / St. Petersburg traces of the stars and times. History of the Russian main observatory , Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-631-49253-7
- Amand von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld: Atlas of celestial studies and coelestial photography , Hartleben's publishing house, Vienna-Pest-Leipzig 1898
Web links
- Homepage of the observatory (English / Russian)
Individual evidence
- ↑ A. Mikhailov, in: The Observatory , Volume 75, p. 28 (1955) [1]
- ↑ P. James E. Peebles, R. Bruce Partridge, Lyman A. Page Jr .: Finding the Big Bang . Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-51982-3 , pp. 134 .
- ^ Loren R. Graham: Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History . Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-28789-0 , pp. 197 .
Coordinates: 59 ° 46 ′ 18.7 " N , 30 ° 19 ′ 34.8" E