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Post Info TOPIC: Stefanik Observatory


L

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RE: Stefanik Observatory
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Around 40,000 people visit the observatory every year. Information on the displays is presented in both Czech and English. While it's most popular from April to October, the museum remains open six days a week, all year, and seven days a week during school holidays. Visits are highly dependent on weather patterns. Also, because of the observatory's geographic location, in the middle of town, the sky at night is orange as opposed to being dark but it serves as sufficient for public observation, he added.
Displayed throughout the planetarium are crystals and rocks, ancient navigational devices, ancient sun dials, moon dials and world globes, along with the largest meteorite in the Czech Republic, a one-ton iron meteorite that fell to Earth in 1906 and was discovered in Scandinavia 10 years ago.

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Štefánik Observatory

Latitude 50.081037° Longitude 14.398369°

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L

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If you are visiting Prague over the summer, then remember to check out the Štefánik Observatory on Petřín Hill which is holding an exhibition on Prague monuments connected to astronomy.

"There are some monuments which are, maybe surprisingly, bound to astronomy or astronomical symbolism, for example the famous Charles Bridge and its tower. The tower of Charles Bridge is constructed in a way which reflects ideas about the universe in the 13th and 14th century."

The exhibition lists many buildings in Prague connected to astronomy.

"The most famous and most significant were Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. He published in Prague his first two laws of celestial mechanics. Later, the famous Christian Doppler lived here who also published his famous principle in Prague, and many other astronomers and physicists, for example, the most famous of them Albert Einstein."

The exhibition will be open until the end of August, but of course, the monuments in Prague can be seen all year round.

The Štefánik Observatory is located in the very heart of Prague, in Petřín´s parks at the Hunger Wall which was built during the reign of Charles IV in the 14th century. The observatory was opened on June 24th, 1928. In the middle of the 70s, a full-scale reconstruction gave the building its current appearance and it was reopened for the public in 1976. Since 1979 the Štefánik observatory is a part of the Observatory and Planetarium of Prague.
The main telescopes of the observatory are a double Zeiss astrograph after the Viennese selenographer König placed in the main dome (bought in 1928) and a mirror Maksutov-Cassegrain installed in the western dome in 1976. The eastern dome of the observatory is only being used for scientific observations and since 1999 equipped with a 40 cm mirror telescope by Meade.

Nowadays the observatory specializes above all in popularisation of astronomy and related natural sciences. Doubtless the most interesting thing the observatory can offer are public day and night observations of the sky which are run whenever the weather is suitable during the whole year.

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