Asiago Astrophysical Observatory
The designer of the Asiago Astrophysical Observatory, architect Daniele Calabi, was not present at its inauguration on May 27, 1942. Being Jewish, he had managed to flee with his family to Brazil following the promulgation of the racial laws.
But he had dedicated months and years of drawings, tests, measurements, sketches, full-scale models to that project. Because what he had to build was a complex structure, which had to support a revolving dome of 15 meters and 50 tons.
The Observatory, for which he had chosen a pinkish-grey stone extracted from local quarries, consisted of two buildings: the observation tower, located on the highest point of the ground, and a building intended for the offices and homes of astronomers. The parabolic mirror telescope was built by Officine Galileo in concert with a technical commission of the University of Padua.
Today the observatory is the campus of scientific research of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padua and INAF, and the "Galileo" telescope is used for scientific purposes, for the monitoring of transient phenomena in stellar objects, and for educational purposes, for the night laboratory exercises of Unipd students of the degree courses in astronomy, mathematics, physics, natural sciences and geological sciences.
You can visit the Unipd campus of Asiago thanks to the numerous initiatives dedicated to the public that allow you to make telescope observations, follow seminars, for girls and boys, have fun building astrorockets or playing astrotombola
The Museum, located in the campus of the Observatory in Asiago, tells the extraordinary history of astronomy through a unique collection of instruments used from the forties to the eighties of the twentieth century, archives and photographic plates of great historical value, testimony of the observations that have written fundamental pages of astronomical science
