Qualla: Argentine National Observatory

Argentine National Observatory: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Federico Mina, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the night the observatory opened in 1871, its director did not yet have a working telescope - so he tipped his head back and started counting stars. Benjamin Apthorp Gould, an American astronomer who had crossed an ocean to reach Córdoba, began that evening to map the southern sky with his naked eye, later reaching for small binoculars, recording more than seven thousand stars by sight alone. The result, the Uranometría Argentina, became the founding work of Argentine astronomy. It was also a quietly radical act: the northern sky had been charted for centuries, but the constellations of the far south had never been set down with such care.

Image: Federico Mina | CC BY-SA 4.0

Argentine National Observatory: A President and an Astronomer

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fernando de Gorocica, CC BY-SA 4.0. The observatory was born of a friendship between two ambitious men. Domingo F. Sarmiento - educator, writer, and future president of Argentina - met Gould while serving as his country's representative in the United States. Gould was hungry to study the southern hemisphere's stars...

Image: Fernando de Gorocica | CC BY-SA 4.0

Argentine National Observatory: Photographing the Stars

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gould did not stop at counting. At Córdoba his team produced what are considered the first stellar photographs in the world - hundreds of glass plates of open star clusters, captured to pin down each star's exact position. From this work came the Catálogo de zonas estelares of 18...

Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 4.0

Argentine National Observatory: One Man's Daring Dream

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0. A generation later, another foreign-born director set himself an even harder task. Charles Dillon Perrine, who took charge in 1909 after years at California's Lick Observatory, proposed building a 61-inch reflecting telescope - equal to the largest in the world at the time. The g...

Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 4.0

Argentine National Observatory: The Mirror at Bosque Alegre

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dario Alpern, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 5 July 1942 - thirty-three years after Perrine first imagined it - the Bosque Alegre Astrophysical Station was inaugurated in the Sierras Chicas, about thirty miles southwest of Córdoba at 1,200 meters. Gaviola, speaking at the opening, called it the work of Perrine's optimist...

Image: Dario Alpern | CC BY-SA 4.0