Kryoneri
Kryoneri Observatory (established in 1972) is located in the district of Corinth in the northern Peloponnese at the top of mount Kyllini (Ziria), at an altitude of 930m, close to Kryoneri village (37˚ 58′ 19″ North, 22˚ 37′ 07″ East).
At a Glance
Manufactured in 1975 & Upgraded in 2016
The telescope was manufactured and installed in 1975 by the British company Grubb Parsons Co., Newcastle. In its original configuration, the telescope was a Cassegrain reflector with a primary parabolic mirror (1.2 m in diameter) and a secondary hyperbolic mirror (0.31 m in diameter) that resulted in a f/13 focal ratio. The mirrors were made of Zerodur material (a type of glass with zero expansion). An account of the financing of the 1.2m telescope, which became possible due to the bequest of Marinos Korialenios in 1916 and the successful application of Dr. Kotsakis to the Government in 1971, is given in the following article, published in 2007, in the Hipparchos newsletter.
In May 2016, the telescope was upgraded by DFM Engineering In for the NELIOTA lunar monitoring project. This upgrade included the conversion of the original optical configuration to a prime focus telescope, the replacement of some mechanical parts of the telescope, the installation of a new control system, dome automation, and the installation of a Prime Focus Instrument (PFI) able to provide a large field-of-view as required for lunar impact observations. The new optical configuration yields a focal ratio of f/2.8 (Xilouris et al. 2018).
In December 2017, the observatory obtained an IAU Minor Planet Center code. The code is “L10”.
An Excellent Facility for Education and Outreach
Kryoneri Observatory has been utilized as a means of education and astronomy outreach to the general public for many decades. Specifically, it has been used to train students in practical exercises of observational astrophysics, such as photometry of double and variable stars, the study of stellar systems and objects of the solar system and many more. So far, more than forty (40) students from the Universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patras have been trained in photometric observations.
Since 1995, guests from areas around Kryoneri have visited the Observatory, under the umbrella of either open doors events or specific tour groups.
Photo: Dr. A. Liakos
Facilities & IT Infrastructure
The facilities at Kryoneri Observatory include the dome building, which hosts the telescope, the telescope control and the guest rooms, the role-off building housing a small telescope, as well as the building that hosts the supporting power generators.
IT infrastructure includes a dedicated (microwave) link of 20 Mbps throughput to the NOA Headquarters in Penteli. The connection is highly secured and reliable and is used for live data transfer of all astronomical, meteorological, and seismological data produced from the installed scientific instruments. Furthermore, a small LAN (at 100Mbps) has been installed in order to support all the scientific activities and personnel requirements.
In 2016, a new LAN of 1Gbps was installed to support the research activities of the upgraded telescope. In addition, a new UPS system and new lightning and earthing systems were installed to provide advanced robustness and reliability in the whole operation of the Observatory. The main Cluster System consists of two (2) nodes HP DL380 Gen9 Servers. Each Server features the following Specifications: (1)1 x Intel Xeon E5-2660v3 processor, (2)64GB Memory (8x8GB 1Rx4 PC4-2133P-R Kits), (3) 2xInternal Storage HP 300GB 12G SAS 10K 2.5in and (4) Smart Array P440ar/2G FIO RAID Controller HP Ethernet 10Gb 2Port 530SFP+ Adaptor.
Each Server interconnects to an HP 2920-24G Switch through dual 10GbE Fiber Connections. For this reason the Switch features 2xHP 2920 2-port 10GbE SFP+ Modules. The Storage Subsystem consists of an HP MSA 2040 SAN DC SFF Storage which includes an additional HP D2700 Disk Enclosure. The Storage Subsystem is populated with 32xHP 1.2TB 6GB SAS 10K SFF DP ENT HDDs, providing a total RAW capacity of 38.4TB. The SAN Subsystem interconnects to the HP 2920-24G switch through eight Gigabit Ethernet Copper Connections over iSCSI.