page_title: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
section_title: Developments after the Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam / History / Developments after the Second World War
caption_attribution_description: Русский: CrAO трофейный 122 cм рефлектор, из Бабельсбергской обсерватории. Carl Zeiss Jena
context_page_description: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam is a German research institute. It is the successor of the Berlin Observatory founded in 1700 and of the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam founded in 1874. The latter was the world's first observatory to emphasize explicitly the research area of astrophysics. The AIP was founded in 1992, in a re-structuring following the German reunification.
  The AIP is privately funded and member of the Leibniz Association. It is located in Babelsberg in the state of Brandenburg, just west of Berlin, though the Einstein Tower solar observatory and the great refractor telescope on Telegrafenberg in Potsdam belong to the AIP.
  The key topics of the AIP are cosmic magnetic fields on various scales and extragalactic astrophysics. Astronomical and astrophysical fields studied at the AIP range from solar and stellar physics to stellar and galactic evolution to cosmology.
  The institute also develops research technology in the fields of spectroscopy and robotic telescopes.
context_section_description: The new start after the war was very difficult. In Potsdam the Einstein Tower had suffered heavy damage by bombs, in Babelsberg valuable instruments, among them the 122 cm telescope (whose former building now houses the AIP library), were dismounted and removed to the Soviet Union as war reparations. Now the 122 cm telescope works in the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory.
  In January 1947 the German Academy of Sciences took the AOP and the Babelsberg Observatory under its administration, but it was not until the beginning of the 1950s before astronomical research started anew.
  AOP director Hans Kienle took over the editorial duties of the professional journal Astronomical Notes (German: Astronomische Nachrichten), which is to this day edited at the AIP and moreover the oldest professional journal for astronomy.
  In June 1954 the Observatory for Solar Radio Astronomy (OSRA) in Tremsdorf (17 km southeast of Potsdam) began its work as a part of the AOP. Its history started in 1896: after the discovery of the radio waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1888, Johannes Wilsing and Julius Scheiner, fellows of the AOP, tried to detect radio emission from the Sun. They did not succeed, because of the low sensitivity of their equipment. After the Second World War Herbert Daene started once again to attempt radio observations of the Sun in Babelsberg which were continued in Tremsdorf.
  In October 1960 the 2 m telescope built by Carl Zeiss Jena was inaugurated in the Tautenburg Forest near Jena and the new Karl Schwarzschild Observatory was founded. The Schmidt variant of this telescope is to this day the largest astronomical wide-field camera in the world and it was the main observational instrument of the astronomers of the GDR.
  In 1969 the four East-German astronomical institutes, Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam, Babelsberg Observatory, the Thuringian Sonneberg Observatory, and Karl Schwarzschild Observatory Tautenburg, were joined in the course of academy reform to the Central Institute of Astrophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. The solar observatory Einstein Tower and Observatory for Solar Radio Astronomy were affiliated later.
  One part of the scientific activities concerned cosmic magnetic fields and cosmic dynamos, phenomena of turbulence, magnetic and eruptive processes on the Sun, explosive energy dissipation processes in plasmas, variable stars and stellar activity. Another part was directed to the early phases of cosmic evolution and the origin of structures in the Universe, large-scale structures up to those of superclusters and to active galaxies. In this connection special methods of image processing have been developed. In addition, investigations in astrometry have also been performed.
  The scientific work of the Central Institute for Astrophysics suffered strongly from the isolation of the GDR from the western world. It was very difficult to come into contact with western colleagues. After the autumn 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, new possibilities at once arose.
caption: The 122 cm Babelsberg telescope in CrAO.
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