Negotiating a great telescope: The case of Czechoslovakia
Abstract
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Astronomical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences undertook a long, complicated journey towards obtaining a 2-m refractor comparable to the largest instruments in the world, inaugurating it during the XIIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union held on August 22‒31, 1967 in Prague. The journey can be reconstructed from archival materials and recorded memories of the witnesses. What made this situation unique is the fact that two very similar telescopes were ordered at roughly the same time for the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Azerbaijan SSR; those telescopes were developed in parallel to reduce costs, becoming the second and third in the Zeiss series of 2-m universal telescopes. The astronomical institutes of CSSR and AzSSR had to negotiate and compromise their requirements, and in addition, because constructing a large telescope and bringing it into service takes many years, anticipate future developments in the relevant fields as well as requirements for equipment and configuration. Successful completion of this international project required a high number of negotiations between astronomers from both institutions, the instrument manufacturer VEB Zeiss Jena, the highest levels of the state administrations, the Czechoslovak foreign trade company KOVO, and multiple other corporations from CSSR and the GDR involved in the construction and delivery of the telescope, its dome, and associated equipment. The project understandably experienced issues such as misunderstandings and delays, which all those actors had to deal with. The outcome of this early effort is a telescope that, following numerous modernisations, is still used for research in today’s Czech Republic. This paper explores this early history of this telescope – from the first suggestions to the delivery and construction in the observatory of the Astronomical Institute of the CSAS in Ondřejov – with particular attention to the negotiations among key actors and to their personal reflections and memories of the process.
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