The team of BELISSIMA at „Meteor 2011 Távcsöves Találkozó” - “Meeting of the members of the Hungarian Astronomical Association with telescopes, 2011“
From 27th to 31st of July, 2011, the Hungarian Astronomical Association organized traditional annual meeting at Tarján, Hungary, which gathers both amateur and professional astronomers, the members of the association, and everyone interested in astronomy. Many of the participants brought their own telescopes in hope that they will have clear skies for observation on a site where the light pollution is low.
Approximately 300 people participated in the meeting. The organizers of the meeting scheduled for each day of the meeting an interesting set of lectures. Two particapants of the BELISSIMA project, Dr. Oliver Vince and Ms. Monika Jurković, were invited to present the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory's past, present and future, and to talk about the BELISSIMA project. The lecture was presented on 29th of July with the title “65L: Astronomy in Belgrade, the BELISSIMA Project, and the Astronomical Station Vidojevica”.
After the lectures the participants of the BELISSIMA project had the opportunity to talk to people present at the meeting. They talked with Tibor Horváth, from the Hegyháti Observatory Foundation, in Hegyhátsál, Hungary. He described his experience on the construction of the observatory in Hegyhátsál, for which they have received money from an EU project to build a 50 cm Ritchey-Chrétien telescope, and after a longer struggle of few years they have managed to collect enough money to build a suitable building where they can put their telescope.
Dr. Vince and Ms. Jurković have talked to András Dán, from the company GEMINI Bt., whose main activity is building mechanics and software for guiding telescopes. His very successful projects are, for example, the above mentioned telescope in Hegyhátsál, the automatic 40 cm telescope at Astronomical Station Piszkéstető, or the 40 cm telescope in the Observatory in Szeged, Hungary.
They also had the chance to talk to the leader of the HAT (Hungarian Automated Telescope) project, Dr. Gáspar Bakos, and one his close associates, Pál Sári, who constructed the whole mechanics of the telescopes used in the HAT project. The telescopes in the HAT project are much smaller dimensions than the ”Milankovic” telescope, but their instruments work almost completely autonomously on 4 continents. The collaborators of the HAT project have written a software for precise determination of the weather conditions, without any human interaction, taking into account all available data from the local meteorological station .
Dr. László L. Kiss, deputy director of the Konkoly Thege Miklós Astronomical Research Institute, expressed his will to Dr. Vince and Ms. Jurković to come to visit the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and give a lecture about the KEPLER space telescope and the possible collaboration.
Dr. Tibor Hegedűs, from the observatory in Baja brought an inflatable planetarium. With him his experiences, and difficulties in the automatization of their instruments were discussed.
Ms. Monica Jurković presents her talk at the Tarján meeting.
Ms. Monica Jurković presents her talk at the Tarján meeting.
