TÜBİTAK National Observatory (Turkish: TÜBİTAK Ulusal Gozlemevi, TUG) is a ground-based astronomical observatory operated by the TUG Institute of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). Established in 1991, it is located at an altitude of 2,450 m (8,040 ft) in Bakırtepe, around 50 km (31 mi) west-southwest of Antalya in southern Turkey.
There are five telescopes installed in Bakırtepe:
- RTT150 - Russian-Turkish 1.5-m Telescope (formerly AZT-22) (2001)
- T100 (ACE RC1.0) - 1.0 m Ritchey–Chrétien telescope (2009)
- T60 (OMI RC06) - 0.6 m Ritchey–Chrétien telescope (2008)
- YT40 (Meade LX200GPS) - 0.4 m Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope (2006)
- ROTSEIIID Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
Discoveries
Scientists led by a Turkish astronomer from Ankara University discovered an exoplanet orbiting the giant star HD 208897, which is located at a distance of some 210 light years from the Earth. The exoplanet has a minimum mass of 1.4 Jupiter masses, and rotates its parent star from about 1.05 AU (156,000,000 km (97,000,000 mi)) away in every 353 days on a nearly circular orbit. The discovery is the result of a ten-year-long research work of precise radial-velocity method carried out by using the Coude Echelle Spectrograph (CES) installed on the 1.5-meter Russian-Turkish Telescope (RTT150). Follow-up observations at the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory (OAO) in Japan and the Ankara University Kreiken Observatory (AUKR) confirmed the discovery, which was made public on August 6, 2017.
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