Forty years since the official opening of the National Astronomical Observatory – Rozhen (NAO Rozhen) will be celebrated on 13 March 2021. In its first years, NAO Rozhen is a scientific astronomical complex of three telescopes: a universal 2-meter telescope for photometric and spectral observations and two smaller telescopes: 50/70-cm Schmidt and 60-cm Cassegrain. The first observations were made on photographic plates, and a high-speed electrophotometer was mounted on the Cassegrain telescope. In the first twenty years of the observatory’s work, more than 10 000 photographs of objects from the solar system, stars and star clusters, distant galaxies and quasars, and thousands spectra of interesting stellar objects were obtained. […]

LOFAR station in Onsala, Sweden. The low-band antennas (10-90 MHz) are visible on the left, and the high-band antennas (110-240 MHz) - on the right. Source: ASTRON A new scientific infrastructure complex, coordinated by the Institute of Astronomy with National Astronomical Observatory (IA with NAO), will be included in the updated National Roadmap for Scientific Infrastructure 2021-2027 (NRSI). Over the last half century, our knowledge of the universe has been enriched by astronomical observations in the optical, infrared, and ultraviolet regions. But one region of the electromagnetic spectrum remains poorly studied - the low-frequency radio range, indicated the Institute of Astronomy. The LOFAR project for the first Bulgarian radio astronomy observatory, proposed by a team from the Institute of Astronomy with National Astronomical [...]

Copernicus Hackathon - Sofia 2020, which is part of the European Copernicus program, as been running since 24 April. The event is being held for the second time since the successful 2019 edition, and this year, due to COVID-19, it is being held online. Bulgaria is the first EU country to succeed in reorganizing the planned live competition - in an online format, allowing participants from 10 EC countries to be involved. The main topics of the event are: "Smart Cities", " Monitoring of the Danube and the Black Sea", "Earth Observation & Artificial Intelligence for E-Government" as well as specific challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic: "Monitoring of the changes in air pollution," "Water Quality Assessment" as well as "Assessment of the geographical distribution [...]

Bulgarian space foods, drones’ capabilities demonstrations and the newest ideas for remote earth sensing from space are just some of the topics that the Space Research and Technology Institute at BAS (SRTI-BAS) spoke about on its Open Door Day on the occasion of the 50th anniversary from its establishment. For the first time, the institute also showed a pilot training simulator. There is also a Technology Transfer Center in SRTI-BAS. A three-dimensional model of Sofia created on the basis of satellite images for analysis and evaluation of air pollution showed the scientists. Another current project is related to the determination of water quality owing to satellite images from space – it has been applied to Varna Lake and Iskar Dam on a test basis. The [...]