About us
Dr. Karl Remeis-Observatory is the Astronomical Institute of the University of Erlangen – Nuremberg. It is located in the city of Bamberg. The observatory was founded in 1889 as a private institution. In 1962, it became part of the University of Erlangen – Nuremberg as its Astronomical Institute. The observatory is one of only three astronomical institutes in the state of Bavaria. Next to the observatory in Hamburg, Dr. Karl Remeis-Observatory is the only modern astronomical institute in Germany that is still located in its original 19th century buildings.
Since 2007 Remeis observatory has been part of the Erlangen Center for Astroparticle Physics (ECAP), in which the university has merged the research in the fields of neutrino physics, X-ray astronomy and space- and ground based gamma-ray astronomy. As members of the physics department, scientists at the observatory are not only involved in research on different topics in astrophysics but also responsible for teaching of astronomy and astrophysics in Erlangen.
For their research, the scientists at the observatory make use of the optical telescopes of ESO (Chile) and observatories on the Canary Islands, in Spain, and Hawaii, radio telescopes and arrays, e.g., in Germany (Effelsberg), the USA (VLA), Chile (ALMA), as well as satellites such as the Hubble Space Telescope, XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL and Chandra. Scientists at the observatory also contribute to the development of new instruments such as eROSITA and ATHENA. For data analysis, modelling, and simulations, local computing facilities as well as the computing clusters in Erlangen and Munich as well as of many institutes in the US are used.
Today, the institute staff consists of more than 50 people, including three professors, three assistants, some Post-Docs, and many PhD, master, and bachelor students, and administrative staff. The research is funded, amongst other, by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, the European Union, European Space Agency, and the Humboldt foundation.
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