Fornax Mounts in Chile – Fornax 200 Installation

Zoltan at 365astronomy got hold of some images of Fornax Mounts staff installing their latest (and so far largest) telescope mount, a Fornax 200.

(365Astronomy is proud to be the official UK distributor of Fornax Mounts…)

The Fornax 200 mount has been specifically designed and developed for this project and is part of the HAT Project (Hungarian Automated Telescope Project). For now we’ll just show you the images here and maybe add more of the story later if Pali tells us about some details…

Basically, Pali (officially Pal Sari, but we just call him Pali, pronounce it as “Palee”) the CEO at Fornax Mounts went to the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to participate in the installation of a Officina Stellare 70cm (appr. 28″) Ritchey-Chretien astrograph and their Fornax 200 equatorial mount. The Fornax 200 mount has been designed to fit the geographical location of the observatory, so the latitude can only be adjusted few degrees at the base of the mount.

Before the installation they had some time to check out two HAT Project telescope systems (4 Takahashi APO refractors on 2 mounts, 8 telescopes in total…) , also supplied by Fornax Mounts few years earlier. These telescopes are used for exoplanet hunting. The first few images show these telescope systems…

After the successful installation of the Fornax 200 they traveled to the south of Chile , so we’ve also included few photos that show the mountains, wildlife (viscacha), and some famous street art of Valparaiso as well.

As you can see from the below images they enjoyed the time and managed to find time for more than just the installation of the telescope…