“Punta Ekar” Telescope

In this post we describe our visit to the telescope of Ekar peak in Asiago : 182cm main mirror, the largest on the Italian territory.
The telescope is located at Ekar peak (about 1400 mslm) near the town of Asiago but away from artificial light sources. In the picture below you can see the dome of the main telescope and the building that houses an ancillary telescope.

The telescope was completed in 1972 and was dedicated to the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. In the images below you can see a detail of the telescope and spectrograph mounted at the main focal point.

It is a Cassegrain reflector telescope as shown in the diagram below.

The telescope is used for the direct observation but mainly for spectroscopic investigations.
For spectroscopy there are two mainly used spectrographs, both equipped with CCD sensors :

• The high dispersion spectrograph “Echelle”
• The spectrograph “AFOSC” that permit to operate both in spectroscopic mode and in visual mode

The spectroscopy of the light emitted by celestial objects allow to obtain a lot of information, for example :
– Surface Temperature of the star
– From the emission lines and absorption it can be inferred the presence of chemical elements
– From the Doppler shift it can be deduced the relative speed with respect to the earth

As an example we report in the below images the spectrum of our star, the sun, acquired through the DIY spectrometer described in the post : DIY Diffraction grating Spectrometer

Reference :
Asiago observatory web site  : Osservatorio Astronomico Asiago

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