Argentine National Observatory

Observatorio Astronómico of Córdoba

The Argentine National Observatory, today The Astronomical Observatory of Córdoba, was founded on 24 October 1871, by Argentine president Domingo F. Sarmiento and the North American astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould.

Its creation is the beginning of astronomical studies in Argentina. When the president Domingo F. Sarmiento was representing his country in the United States, He had the opportunity to meet the pioneering astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould, who was very interested in travel to Argentina in order to study the stellar south hemisphere.

Once Sarmiento was already installed as president of Argentina, he invited the eminent scientist to travel to Argentina in 1869, to provide his full support to organize an observatory. Gould arrived in Buenos Aires in 1870. The same night of the inauguration of the Astronomical Observatory of Cordoba, Gould began with the naked eye, later with the aid of small binoculars, a map of the southern sky, with more than 7000 stars recorded, that was published under the name of Uranometría Argentina.

Gould was director of the observatory until 1885, that year he return to United States. Among his works on the observatory, we must mention its Catálogo de Zonas (1884), which was registered more than 70,000 stars of the southern hemisphere, and the Argentinian General Catalog which contains about 35,000 stars whose positions were established with very good accuracy. Other important issue was the first stellar photographs taken in the world at this observatory. For this work were taken hundreds of sheets of open star clusters in the southern hemisphere, which was subsequently determined the positions of each stars. This was the first systematic and large-scale astronomy book published using the photographic technique. It was published in 1897 under the name Fotografías Cordobesas.

External links

• (Spanish) [1] The Astronomical Observatory of Córdoba
• (Spanish) Visita a la Estación Astrofísica de Bosque Alegre