Observatory

Osservatorio Astronomico

L'Osservatorio Astronomico è stato fortemente danneggiato dal vento del 24/2/2019. Attualmente la struttura è stata rimossa e verrà sostituita da una nuova più robusta.
   

The Observatory   (Lat. 40°46'30''N, Lon. 14°47'20''E, Alt. 290 m)

The Observatory was operational since 22/03/2011.

The dome (Sirius University Observatory, 6.7m in diameter) has been mounted on 30/04/2010. This is the largest dome inside a University campus in Italy.
The present telescope hosted by the observatory is a PRO RC600 made by Officina Stellare (diameter 0.60m, f/8) , installed on 26/11/2015.
The mount supporting the telescope is a GM-4000 HPS by 10micron, with 15'' pointing accuracy and precision encoders.
The CCD is a FingerLakes Instrument Proline L230 with 2048x2048 pixels. The field of view is 21'x21'.

The CCD is equipped with a Rotofocuser and a filter wheel with a UBVRI Bessell set, and a diffraction grating for spectroscopy.

Here are some images collected by our old telescope and CCD (Celestron C14 and SBIG ST2000).

M42 (Orion Nebula) Jupiter Moon at the eclipse
Toutatis
M51 (spiral galaxy) M82 (starburst galaxy) Toutatis fly-by 12/12/2012

The observatory is used by undergraduate students in physics in the course of Laboratorio specialistico (settore astrofisico). Specific thesis projects are also implemented.

Research with Salerno Observatory

Our observatory participates in several scientific programs for the discovery and the characterization of extrasolar planets by the microlensing method and by the transit method.

It is part of the MiNDSTEp network of telescopes engaged in follow-up of microlensing events discovered in the Galactic Bulge. The aim of the programme is to detect extrasolar planets by the microlensing method. The data collected by Salerno telescope are available via rsync on the ARTEMiS website. Recently, our observations have supported the Spitzer and Kepler satellites, which have dedicated an important part of their observing time to microlensing.

Our observatory is also part of the follow-up network of the KELT collaboration, looking for extrasolar planets by the transit method. Candidates detected by the KELT survey must be validated by detailed observations by the follow-up network. In June 2017 we participated in the discovery of KELT-9b, the hottest planet ever found, published in Nature.

We have now entered the TESS follow-up network performing seeing-limited photometry for the validation of transiting exoplanetary candidates discovered by the NASA spacecraft.

Publications including data taken by Salerno University Observatory