Chuhuiv Observational Station (or Chuguev Observational Station) of the Institute of Astronomy of

Kharkiv National University The V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (), also known as Kharkiv National University or Karazin University, is a public university in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It was founded in 1804 through the efforts of Vasily Karazin, becoming the second olde ...

is an

astronomical observatory An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geophysics, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed. Th ...

founded in the early 1960s near the village of Ivanovka,

Chuhuiv Raion Chuhuiv Raion () is a raion (district) in Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine. Its administrative center is the city of Chuhuiv. Population: On 18 July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, the number of raions of Kharkiv Oblast was reduce ...

Kharkiv Oblast Kharkiv Oblast (, ), also referred to as Kharkivshchyna (), is an oblast (province) in eastern Ukraine. Kharkiv borders Luhansk Oblast to the east, Donetsk Oblast to the southeast, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to the southwest, Poltava Oblast to the w ...

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

. In 2022 the observational station was occupied and severely plundered by Russian soldiers, who during 6 months of occupation stole or damaged most of the scientific equipment. The founder of the observatory was Nikolai P. Barabashov. The main instrument of the observatory is 70-cm reflector AZT-8. The observational station hosted one of the first coherent optics processors used to reduce astronomical observations. The main topics of the observations conducted on the observational station are photometric observations of

asteroids An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

and monitoring of

space debris Space debris (also known as space junk, space pollution, space waste, space trash, space garbage, or cosmic debris) are defunct human-made objects in spaceprincipally in Earth orbitwhich no longer serve a useful function. These include dere ...

. In particular, the observations conducted here significantly contributed to the introduction of H-G1-G2 asteroid magnitude system and to the discovery of the

YORP effect The Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect, or YORP effect for short, changes the rotation state of a small astronomical body – that is, the body's spin rate and the obliquity of its pole(s) – due to the scattering of solar radia ...

for several asteroids.

References

External links

* * * * Astronomical observatories in Ukraine National University of Kharkiv Buildings and structures in Kharkiv Oblast Chuhuiv Kharkiv Observatory {{Observatory-stub