Facilities and resources
The Institute of Astrophysics is located in the San Joaquín campus of the UC.
The offices of teachers and students are distributed in a two-story building. The Institute has access to all the facilities of the Faculty and University, including libraries, multiple rooms, laboratories, internet, video conferencing, banks and other services. The university has online access to the major journals in Astronomy.
The Institute of Astrophysics has two clusters of 512 and 520 cores each. These are for high capacity and multi calculations work, which is mainly used for cosmological simulations. The Institute houses astronomical databases, including a mirror of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).
Members of the Institute have access to 10% of the time in all chilean observatories in northern Chile. These include the four VLT telescopes at Paranal, Gemini South on Cerro Pachon, the two Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory and sub-millimeter interferometer ALMA at Chajnantor plateau.
The Institute has a Teaching Observatory and a radiotelescope for teaching. It also has the historic observatory Manuel Foster at Cerro San Cristóbal and a workshop in the San Joaquín campus to repair, upgrade and improve our telescopes.
The teaching observatory, opened in January 2005, is located in Lo Barnechea , within the Hacienda Santa Martina (Nature & Golf Club). Here our students made their first scientific observations , and in addition we have a program for visits from schools.
The Santa Martina Teaching Observatory has a 50 cm telescope donated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a 40 cm donated by the International Observatory of Cerro Tololo and two DAA acquired funds and support from the UC. To this group joins other installed outside the main building of the Institute of Astrophysics and works by remote control, ownership of American consortium SLOOH.
For more information visit the Observatory web.
