The Observatorio Astronómico de Quito is housed in a ravishing Victorian constructing within the coronary heart of Parque Alameda. Credit score: David Boehnlein
Quito, the capital metropolis of Ecuador, is perched on the mountainous spine of the Andes, which run by the middle of this equatorial nation on the northwest shoulder of South America. Though February is the moist season, however it isn’t raining at this time so folks lounge close to a pond in Parque Alameda, with fountains spraying jets of water previous a luxuriant palm.
My vacation spot is on the coronary heart of the park: the Observatorio Astronómico de Quito (OAQ). Once I attain the ornate, butter-yellow Victorian construction, I really feel as if I’ve stepped again in time. It’s laid out as a Greek cross, with 5 turreted towers. Though the constructing is now a museum, it’s nonetheless the middle of Ecuador’s solely astronomical analysis establishment, the Escuela Polytécnica Nacional (EPN).
In my faltering Spanish, I clarify to the guards that I’m there to satisfy the director. Their faces brighten and one escorts me to the workplace of Dr. Ericson Lopez. He has simply returned from instructing a category at EPN. College students huddle over pc screens within the anteroom as Lopez brings me into his workplace. It retains an vintage really feel, regardless of the fashionable computer systems outdoors.
Establishing an observatory
The observatory was based in 1873 on the directive of Ecuadorian president Gabriel García Moreno, who personally laid the primary stone. He introduced a gaggle of Jesuit students from Germany to ascertain the EPN and named Father Juan Bautista Menten as the primary director of the observatory. Menten used Germany’s Bonn Observatory as a foundation for the design and building of the OAQ and obtained a 9.4-inch refracting telescope from Georg Merz & Sons of Munich.
Traditionally, the observatory’s major work was astrometry, the exact willpower of the place and motion of celestial objects. Ecuador’s location on the equator affords the power to check each the Northern and Southern hemispheres, making it an excellent location for such work. Nonetheless, with Quito’s modern-day mild air pollution, the analysis emphasis has shifted to computational astrophysics moderately than observing.
When Lopez took the helm as director in 1996, he was the one skilled astronomer in Ecuador. Immediately, he proudly tells me, the quantity is 30 and rising. Coaching new scientists is a precedence and college students have used knowledge from such sources because the Hubble Area Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The resident devices, not lively in analysis, are a part of the magnificent astronomy museum.
Within the museum, Lopez exhibits me a plaque introduced in 1743 by the First French Geodetic Mission, whose goal was to ascertain Earth’s true form. The museum additionally incorporates devices from the Second French Geodetic Mission, which arrived in 1901. They embody a ravishing transit telescope, nonetheless positioned in entrance of its observing slit. From a later period is a functioning atomic clock. However the spotlight is the gorgeous copper and brass Merz refractor. At first look, the horizontal mount appears prefer it’s alt-azimuth. However after all, it’s equatorial — the pole star is solely on the horizon right here. The telescope is well-liked on public observing nights and Lopez nonetheless takes delight within the exclamation of surprise when a customer sees a planet for the primary time.
The OAQ can also be lively outdoors the Quito campus. In 2007, the Worldwide Heliophysical Yr, Kyushu College in Japan initiated the Magnetic Information Acquisition System (MAGDAS). It’s a worldwide examine of solar results on Earth’s magnetosphere. In 2012, the OAQ put in a magnetometer within the Jerusalem forest protect northeast of the town as a part of MAGDAS, the place it makes measurements of Earth’s magnetic area.
Astronomy on the equator
However to Lopez, that is only a starting. He desires of a brand new observatory excessive within the Andes, at a web site some 22 miles (35 kilometers) north of Quito with a latitude of 0° 0′ 8.67″ South. “Having an observatory precisely on the equator would enable for correlation of sky surveys between the Northern and Southern hemispheres,” he says as he exhibits me a conceptual design of the power. Funding to assemble it’s not but accessible, however he stays hopeful.
The equator is just not fairly like anyplace else. The following day I visited Mitad del Mundo, the Center of the World. There’s a powerful monument on the spot believed to be the placement of the equator circa 1980, however newer measurements with GPS present that it’s practically 790 ft (240 meters) off. The monument isn’t going wherever, however a smaller park lies on the true equator. It has a giant crimson line painted alongside the equator itself, similar to on a desktop globe. I used to be a number of weeks too early for the Day With out a Shadow: On the equinox, the Solar is straight over the equator at midday and for a number of minutes shadows lie straight underfoot, whereas buildings and different vertical objects seem to forged no shadow in any respect.
Astronomy in Ecuador goes again a lot sooner than the Nineteenth century. This was as soon as a part of the Incan empire, and plenty of Ecuadorians nonetheless rejoice the Incan solstice pageant of Inti Raymi. Just a few days after leaving Quito, I used to be exploring El Cajas Nationwide Park. This can be a rugged area of glacier-carved valleys and lakes, the place wild orchids develop on Polylepsis “paper bushes” and the endangered South American Condor can nonetheless be seen.
My information introduced me to a ledge overlooking a valley and confirmed me a spherical gap minimize right into a rock. Why would someone come to this distant spot simply to gouge a gap in a rock? No one is certain, he stated, however it’s regarded as an Incan solstice marker. To find out precisely when the solstice occurred, the Incas constructed markers that may solely be illuminated at the moment. However was this a solstice marker? It was going through east — perhaps at daybreak on the solstice, that darkish gap turns into a circle of sunshine. I requested whether or not anybody had ever come right here on the solstice to see what occurs. My information didn’t know. Perhaps that’s a mission for a future journey.
