Cart du Ciel Telescope

The Vatican Observatory was one of eighteen observatories collaborating on the project, organized at Paris in 1887, to make a map of the entire sky.

The “Carte du Ciel” telescope which was used for this project was mounted in 1891 on the Leonine Tower in the Vatican. In 1942 it was transferred to the dome atop this building. The final plates for the Carte du Ciel project were made in 1953. The astrograph has an aperture of 33cm and a focal length of 343 cm; it used 13cm x 13cm photographic plates at an image scale of 1′ / m.