Research projects

Automating the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope for feeding VATT-light into PEPSI.

4MIDABLE-LR will provide the largest spectroscopic follow-up of Gaia, providing a detailed 3D chrono-chemokinematical  map of stellar disk and bar-bulge of the Milky Way.

PUNCH4NFDI is the NFDI consortium of particle, astro-, astroparticle, hadron and nuclear physics, representing about 9.000 scientists with a Ph.D. in Germany, from universities, the Max Planck society, the Leibniz Association, and the Helmholtz Association. PUNCH physics addresses the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, as well as their role for the development of the largest structures in the universe - stars and galaxies.

Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument for the LBT, high-resolution polarimetric spectrograph

PEPSI during daytime: disk-unresolved solar light is fed to the spectrograph from a small Sun-as-a-star telescope. The upgrade SDI-POL will feed polarised light via two fibers to the spectrograph.

A robotic wide-field telescope with a FOV of 50 square degrees to support the PLATO mission

A high-resolution survey of TESS target stars near the northern ecliptic pole.

1.5-m optical solar telescope on Tenerife. The telescope is able to resolve 70 km on the Sun.

4-meter Multi Object Spectroscopic Telescope

Provides fine-grained and flexible access to resources, data and compute clusters or GPU via a browser-based work environment.

Digitisation of photographic and spectroscopic plates made available in a database via a web interface.

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillation of stars) is a satellite mission that will continuously observe a 100 000 stars in a field-of-view of ~2250 sq.deg. using a suite of 24 telescopes.

LBT laser-guide star facility with tip-tilt sensing mechanism

A Python framework for the publication of scientific databases developed mostly by the E-Science and Supercomputing section of AIP.

German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory. GAVO is the contribution for building a "Virtual Observatory" platform in Germany

The structured database contains data from high-resolution cosmological simulations accessible via a webinterface and direct SQL queries.

Debian as a system that fits the requirements of both professional and hobby astronomers

Low-Frequency Array: A European radio telescope with innovative computer and network infrastructure

Solar Disk Integrated (SDI) telescope to feed disk-unresolved solar light to the PEPSI spectrograph.

Two permanent fibre units for PEPSI at the LBT

RoboTel is a smaller copy of STELLA. It serves as a robotic test telescope as well as for educational purposes.

The integral-field spectrograph at the European Very Large Telescope in Chile.

By measuring precise positions and motions, the ESA satellite Gaia creates the most accurate map of the Milky Way to answer questions about the origin and evolution of our galaxy.

Robotic telescopes for stellar activity. Instruments are an Echelle spectrograph and a wide-field imaging photometer.

The RAdial Velocity Experiment was a survey to measure the radial velocities, metallicities and abundance ratios for nearly half a million stars. The data are available via the project website.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has created the detailed images of 1/3 of the sky in the visible wavelength range as well as three-dimensional maps of the Universe and spectra for more than three million astronomical objects.

The Large Binocular Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona is equipped with two 8.4-metre-diameter mirrors mounted in parallel like binoculars.

ESCAPE – European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures

The Research Data Management Organiser is Open Source software used by a wide spread community.

Project for investigating light pollution and its causes

Originally intended as a replacement for the canceled Eddington ESA-mission, to be brought to Dome-C, Antarctica. Discontinued due to unclear access situation on Dome-C.

Acquisition, Guiding and Wavefront sensing unit for the Large Binocular Telescope, Mt. Graham, Arizona. It will collect the light with two 8.4m mirrors.

Twin Automatic Photoelectric Telescopes "Wolfgang Amadeus"; robotic stellar photometry from southern Arizona