FRAM telescopes

Update 1. 1. 2025 A new comet was spotted on the night of 24–25 December 2024 by scientist Martin Mašek from the Institute of Physics over the western horizon in Argentina. He operated the telescope online from Liberec (city in the Czech Republic). This is the first Czech discovery of a comet where the observer was not physically present in the observatory, and the first Czech discovery from the southern hemisphere. The comet will not appear above our horizon until late February or early March. 

On the night of June 19-20, 2021, visible light from a source 10 billion light-years away from Earth was captured by three telescopes. Two of them – robotic telescopes – are operated by Czech institutions – the D50, located in Ondřejov, is managed by the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, while the other, FRAM-ORM, is located on the Spanish island of La Palma. The third telescope, Mini-MegaTORTORA, is installed in Nizhny Arkhyz, Russia. An international team has published a study of this extraordinary source in the May issue of Nature Astronomy.

Latest observation by GRANDMA network allows scientists to set limits on specific astrophysical phenomena. Astronomers were looking for gravitational waves to see events invisible to optical and radio telescopes.

This year marks the 20th anniversary since the founding agreement of the international Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina has been signed. The celebration ceremony that took place last week in Malargüe was attended not only by a delegation of Czech scientists but also by the Czech Ambassador in Argentina Karel Beran.

Masek took the picture of it with the aid of the FRAM robotic telescope, which is a part of the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. The observatory is designed to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.