Abstract
A TELEGRAM received at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, from G. A. Shajn, member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., gives an account of the fate suffered at the hands of the enemy by the Simeis Observatory in the Crimea. A week or two before the Germans occupied the southern part of the Crimea, the staff of the Observatory was evacuated, the workers taking with them the object glasses of the two astrographs and part of the laboratory equipment. In May 1944, after the Crimea had been liberated by the Red Army, the Academy of Sciences sent Dr. Shajn to inspect the remains of the Observatory. He established the following facts. During September and October 1943 German specialists dismantled all the Observatory's instruments and moved them in thirty or more trucks to Simferopol, whence they were dispatched to Germany. The equipment stolen was the 40-in. reflecting telescope, the double astrograph, a new astrograph for zonal observations, a photoheliograph, three stellar spectrographs, a large cœlostat, a long-screw measuring machine, a Repsold machine, a microphotometer and two astronomical clocks.
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Looting of Simeis Observatory. Nature 154, 266 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154266b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154266b0