Research groups and projects
Telescope control and robotics
Development of robotic telescopes, instruments, and software solutions for data reduction, archiving and "gridification"
| AGW at LBT | Acquisition, Guiding and Wavefront sensing unit for the Large Binocular Telescope, Mt. Graham, Arizona. It will collect the light with two 8.4m mirrors. |
| STELLA | Robotic telescopes for stellar activity. Instruments are an Echelle spectrograph and a wide-field imaging photometer. |
| RoboTel | RoboTel is a smaller copy of STELLA. It serves as a robotic test telescope as well as for educational purposes. |
High-resolution spectroscopy and polarimetry
Development of high-resolution spectrographs and polarimeters for solar and stellar physics
| PEPSI | Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument for the LBT |
| SES at STELLA | The STELLA Echelle Spectrograph (SES) is a fiber-fed spectrograph with a fixed wavelength format of 390-860nm and a spectral resolution of 55,000. |
| GREGOR | Polarimetric calibration unit for the 1.5m Gregory Telescope on Tenerife, and the GREGOR at night stellar spectrograph. |
3D spectroscopy
Development of optical focal-plane instrumentation for ground-based telescopes
| MUSE | The Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer is a second generation instrument in development for the Very Large Telescope (VLT). |
| PMAS | The Potsdam Multi-Aperture Spectrophotometer is an integral field instrument developed at the AIP. |
| innoFSPEC | Center for innovation competence in fiber-spectroscopy and sensing |
| HETDEX/VIRUS | VIRUS will be a giant optical integral-field unit spectrograph for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment |
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Completed projects |
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| Euro3D | Promoting 3D spectroscopy in Europe; a research training network, funded by the European Commission |
| ULTROS | A collaboration of AIP and Potsdam University to develop and apply the method of "nod-shuffle" observations for faint object 3D spectroscopy using PMAS |
Supercomputing and e-science
The extensive use of supercomputers and networking in ambitious projects coupled with the vision of global resource use
| AMIGA | Adaptive Mesh Investigations of Galaxy Assembly; adaptive mesh refinement code for cosmological simulations |
| AstroGrid-D | AstroGrid-D is a cooperation for distributed computing and sharing resources based on innovative grid technologies. |
| EFRE network | A high-speed network of the AIP and AEI funded by the European funding of regional development |
| GAVO | German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory. GAVO is a project for building a "Virtual Observatory" platform in Germany |
| LOFAR | The Low-Frequency Array is a western European antennae array. Interferometry is achived by super-computational treatment of the data stream. |
| NIRVANA | Numerical code for 3D non-relativistic, compressible MHD with adaptive mesh refinement and self-gravity. |
| Plate Archive | Digitization project for the 10,000 photographic and spectroscopic plates of the observatories in Potsdam |
