See the sky and the stars in Bosscha Observatory

Posted on February 23, 2012 | No Comments

Bosscha Observatory is the oldest observatory in Indonesia. The observatory is located in Lembang, West Java, approximately 15 kilometers (9mil) north of Bandung. It's situated on a hilly six hectares of land, and is 1,310 meters (4,298 ft) above mean sea level plateau. The IAU observatory code for Bosscha is 299. During the first meeting of the Nederlandsch-Indische Sterrekundige Vereeniging (Dutch-Indies Astronomical society) in the 1920s, it was agreed that an observatory was needed to study astronomy in the Dutch East Indies. Of all locations in the Indonesia archipelago, a tea plantation in Malabar, a few kilometers north of Bandung in West Java was selected. The observatory is named after the tea plantation owner Karel Albert Rudolf Bosscha, son of the physicist Johannes Bosscha and a major force in the development of science and technology in the Dutch East Indies, who granted six hectares of his property for the new observatory. Five large telescopes were installed in Bosscha; 1. The Zeiss Double Refractor This telescope is mainly used to observe visual binary stars, conduct photometric studies on eclipsing binaries. image lunar craters, observe planets (Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) and to observe comet details and other heavy bodies. The telescope has two objective lenses with a diameter of 60 cm (23.6 in) each and a focal length of 10.7m (35 ( Read More )