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Pier soon in place

Pier
The pier is very heavy. It was a challenge to move it 100 meters to the observatory on a lightweight trolley.

Astrosysteme Austria (ASA) made the pier in 11 millimeter thick steel. It is designed as a "knicksäule", a bent column which is custom-made to the observatory's latitude and the telescope's back-focus and instrument package. The back-focus and instrument space determines the length of the pier's polar arm. This in turn determines the angle of the lower arm to allow continuous tracking past the meridian. The customer-specified height of the polar axis is also taken into account, which in this case is 1923 mm. The latitude of the observatory is 59 degrees.