中文English Welcome to the Xinglong Observatory!

About the Xinglong Observatory

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The Xinglong Observatory of the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) (IAU code: 327, coordinates: 40°23′39′′ N, 117°34′30′′ E) was founded in 1968. At present, it is one of most primary observing stations of NAOC. As the largest optical astronomical observatory site in the continent of Asia, it has 9 telescopes with effective aperture larger than 50 cm. These are the Guo Shoujing Telescope, also called the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), the 2.16-m Telescope, a 1.26-m optical & near-infrared telescope, a 1-m Alt-Az telescope, an 85-cm telescope (NAOC-Beijing Normal University Telescope, NBT), an 80-cm telescope (Tsinghua University-NAOC Telescope, TNT), a 60-cm telescope, a 50-cm telescope and a 60/90-cm Schmidt telescope.

The average altitude of the Xinglong Observatory is about 900 m. The Xinglong Observatory is located at the south of the main peak of the Yanshan Mountains, in the Xinglong County, Hebei Province, which lies about 120 km (about 2 hours’ drive) to the northeast of Beijing. A shuttle bus runs between NAOC campus and Xinglong Observatory every Tuesday and Friday. The mean and media seeing values of the Xinglong Observatory are 1.9′′ and 1.7′′, respectively. On average, there are 117 photometric nights and 230 observable nights per year based on the data of 2007-2014. Most of the time, the wind speed is less than 4 m/s (the mean value is 2 m/s), and the sky brightness is about 21.1 mag arcsec2 in V band at the zenith.

Each year, more than a hundred astronomers use the telescopes of the Xinglong Observatory to perform the observations for the studies on Galactic sciences (stellar parameters, extinction measurements, Galactic structures, exoplanets, etc.) and extragalactic sciences (including nearby galaxies, AGNs, high-redshift quasars), as well as time-domain astronomy (supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, stellar tidal disruption events, and different types of variable stars). In recent years, besides the basic daily maintenance of the telescopes, new techniques and methods have been explored by the engineers and technicians of the Xinglong Observatory to improve the efficiency of observations. Meanwhile, the Xinglong Observatory is also a National populscience and education base of China for training students from graduate schools, colleges, high schools and other education institutes throughout China, and it has hosted a number of international workshops and summer schools.

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