Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2024

35 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING for three new optical telescopes, which will join existing facilities to explore how fast the Universe is ex- panding. The Observatory is dedi- cated to the Araucaria Project, a collaboration between astronomers The data gathered at the Observa- tory will be important for determin- ing precisely the expansion rate of the Universe. Located in the high and dry Ata- cama Desert, the observing condi- tions are among the best in the world. As well as sharing pristine skies with other ESO telescopes — ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is under construction on the neighbouring Cerro Armazones, and Cerro Paranal, where ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located, is just 20 kilometres away — the sep- arate facilities will share resources such as fibre optic cables for inter- net and access roads. In addition to the renewed scientific capability of the Observatory, the inauguration also marks a new era in its operation. In 2020, leadership was transferred from the Ruhr Uni- versity Bochum (RUB) and the Catholic University of the North (UCN), who had jointly run it since 2005, to CAMK. Formerly called the Cerro Armazones Observatory, the new name honours Rolf Chini, a professor at RUB who is credited with the creation and development of the observatory, and Cerro Mur- phy, the hill it resides on. The new optical telescopes include the 1.5-metre telescope Janusz Kału ! ny, for imaging and high res- olution spectroscopy, as well as the 0.8-metre telescope Zbigniew “Zibi” Kołaczkowski and the 0.6-metre telescope Wojtek Krzemi ń ski, both for imaging. In addition, a new 2.5- metre telescope, the largest Polish telescope to date, will be added to the Observatory, with the start of operations planned for 2025. From the Observatory’s previous opera- tions are the 0.8-metre InfraRed Im- aging System (IRIS), an infrared imager, and the 30-centimetre BMK10k, a robotic, wide-field cam- era operated by the Leibniz-Insti- tute for Astrophysics in Potsdam. from Chile, the USA and Europe, fo- cused on improving the calibration of the extragalactic distance scale, a combination of methods by which astronomers measure the distance of objects throughout the Universe. ! S et atop Cerro Murphy, the hill its named after, the ob- servatory, run by the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CAMK), currently hosts one infrared telescope and four optical telescopes. A new optical telescope, the largest Polish telescope to date with a 2.5-metre mirror, will be installed in the future, with the start of operations planned for 2025. [P. Karczmarek/CAMK/ESO]