Rathenower refractor
The Rolf refractor in Rathenow is a Schupmann medial telescope and therefore, strictly speaking, not a refractor at all, but a hybrid of mirror and lens telescope. At least this was the conceptual goal of Ludwig Schupmann (1899). The Rathenower instrument is a Schupmann Brachymedial Type B. The engineer and amateur astronomer Edwin Rolf built it according to the concepts of Ludwig Schupmann . Until the construction of the Swedish solar observatory on La Palma in 2002 , it was the world's largest instrument of this type.
In Rathenow, Edwin Rolf, from Arnau in what is now the Czech Republic, built the telescope in his garden from around 1949 to 1953 out of his own interest. In 1953 he received support from the GDR Academy of Sciences . Shortly before his death, the telescope was placed under monument protection by the city of Rathenow in 1990. Nevertheless it was sold after the death of the designer and bought back by the city. From 1994 to 1996 it was restored and until 2008 stood in the schoolyard of today's Bruno H. Bürgel Comprehensive School on the eastern edge of the city. The Rathenower Brachymedial has been located in the Rathenow Optics Park (site of the former state horticultural show) since Christmas 2008.
The telescope is a brachymedial telescope . This means that it consists of a non- achromatic crown glass lens, a correction system consisting of a biconcave flint glass lens and a spherical concave mirror at the lower end of the tube , deflection prisms and an eyepiece . The tube can be viewed from a small roofed platform in the middle of the cigar-shaped tube. With the Schupmann-Medial, the chromatic color error of the non-achromatic objective lens is only compensated for by the other elements in the beam path.
Technical specifications
- Opening: 70 cm (9th place among telescopes with large openings worldwide)
- Focal length: 20.80 m (2nd place after the "giant telescope" in Berlin-Treptow )
- Tube length: 10.15 m
- Total height: 11.50 m
Web links
Coordinates: 52 ° 36 '23.93 " N , 12 ° 21' 45.19" E
literature
- Susanne M Hoffmann: The giant Schupmann telescope from Rathenow, Verlag tredition, Hamburg, 2015