kanTengri - Astronomical

The Tien Shan Astronomical Observatory is situated in the middle of Central Asia, within the splendid mountains of Tien Shan mountain chain, 2,800 m above sea level.

The altitude of location is just at the boundary between the fir woods and alpine meadows. The real advantage of the observatory position is that this piece of the intact mountain world is only 30 kilometers from Almaty city, the biggest city of Kazakhstan.

There is a number of astronomical instruments available at the observatory at present.

Two Richi-Cretien-Coudet telescopes, the mirror diameter is 1 m (Zeiss-1000). The telescopes are provided with the semi-automatic directing system. The equipment of each telescope includes photographic device, UAGS spectrograph, focus shortening photographic system, Fabri- Perrot interferometer. The telescopes are also equipped with original photometers. Two-channel polarimeter with the digital data processing system has been used for quasi-synchronous photometric observations of stars and for polarimetric observations.
Two Cassegren telescopes, the mirror diameter 48 cm. The telescopes are equipped with photoelectric photometers used for simultaneous digital data acquisition from four photometric channels.
HSFA horizontal solar telescope-spectrograph (Carl Zeiss Jena).
Besides these main instruments, the observatory is additionally equipped with 20 cm Coudet refractor, ACU-5 horizontal solar telescope, large Nikolsky coronogragh, Shcmidt astrograph. A 80 cm reflector (Carl Zeiss Jena) is being mounted now.

The distribution of clear nights reaches its maximum in autumn and winter when the clear sky is rare at most of European observatories. Hence the period of clear weather completes the clear periods in Europe.