www.baader-observatories.com
The observatory was completed on June 14, 2002 and is located on the roof of the local Johannes Kepler Gymnasium. The owner of the building is the town of Weil der Stadt, while the instrumental equipment (telescopes, accessories, computers, etc.) and the operation are provided by the Kepler Society.
Our instruments, first installed in 2002, were almost completely replaced at the beginning of November 2010 with much more powerful ones. The equipment now consists of the following instruments:
The main equipment has since included a 7" Starfire refractor (180/1620), a PlaneWave CDK20 (500/3454), and a Zeiss AQ 80/840 on a common Astro-Physics 3600 GTO mount. The 7" refractor is a universally usable lens telescope, especially for the visual and photographic observation of objects in our solar system (Sun, planets, moons) and of large-area deep-sky objects such as the Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, Pleiades, California Nebula, etc. The PlaneWave CDK 20, a Dall-Kirkham design with flattened image field for large-format cameras, is a reflecting telescope and is particularly suitable, due to its especially large aperture, for the visual and photographic observation of distant, faint objects such as gaseous nebulae, planetary nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies. The small Zeiss telescope is also a refractor, which is used primarily for solar observation, preferably in the deep red H-alpha light of hydrogen. The peripheral equipment includes supplementary structures such as an eyepiece cabinet as well as devices that make handling the instruments easier. Two PCs are used to display star charts, control telescopes and cameras, process images, and provide access to the Internet.
The dome is opened/closed manually and rotated electrically by remote control. In damp weather, a dehumidifier regulates the humidity.
The main instruments, which are located in a 3.2 m Baader dome, are complemented by additional instruments that can be set up as required on a large adjacent observing platform.
Many more pictures of the instruments used and of the setup of the large instruments can be found on the Kepler Dome Website.
