The EST Communication Office has just released a solar telescope gallery, which contains high-quality images of 21 telescopes and observatories currently in operation all over Europe.
Through 354 selected images, the new EST Telescope Gallery showcases solar telescopes and observatories across Europe, along with some of their instruments and laboratories. Represented in the gallery are the Dutch Open Telescope, the Einstein Tower, the Observatory of the University of Coimbra, GREGOR, Hvar Observatory, the IRSOL Gregory Coudé Telescope, Kanzelhöhe Solar Observatory, the Large Coronograph at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Wrocklaw, Lomnický Štít Observatory, Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, Observatoire du Pic du Midi, Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, Observatorio del Teide, Ondřejov Observatory, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Catania, Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Solar Orbiter, SUNRISE, the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope, THÉMIS, and the German Vacuum Tower Telescope.
All the pictures can be downloaded from the EST website at https://est-east.eu/telescopes-gallery. They are accompanied by a short description and appropiate credits. The Solar Telescope Gallery has been possible thanks to the collaboration of the institutions running the facilities, who have selected the best images and provided detailed descriptions. The collection testifies to the strength of the European solar community and the diversity of facilites that support it. From the Einstein Tower to Solar Orbiter, the gallery goes through a century of state-of-the-art infrastructures devoted to solar physics research in Europe.
The Solar Telescope Gallery is conceived as a tool for education, dissemination, and outreach. The images can be used for presentations, documents and printed publications. It provides a convenient resource to illustrate the main infrastructures used to study the Sun in Europe.
Similarly to the EST Solar Gallery, the images can be downloaded freely under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage people to make use of them as much as possible, giving proper credits to the authors and institutions that kindly contributed their photographs. The gallery is open to improvements, so the EST Communication Office will be happy to consider adding new pictures. All the images, plus many additional ones, are available for download through the EST Cloud Repository.
The gallery has received more than 630 visits since its release in October 2020. To promote this new resource, we have prepared a series of short videos showing drone recordings of some of the telescopes. They offer astonishing aerial views of the buildings. The videos will appear on the EST social media over the course of the next weeks. We invite you to watch them and share them as much as possible.
