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The Carte du Ciel and the Latin American Observatories

Abstract:

2017 marked the 130th anniversary of the start of the Carte du Ciel project, an ambitious proposal by the Paris Observatory to map the entire sky using photographiy, which required the joint work of numerous observatories in the world. For this endeavour, an impressive organization was designed that included congresses, commissions and publications, which lasted through many years. The Carte du Ciel finally became one of the immediate antecedents of the International Astronomical Union, which in 2019 celebrates its first century. In Latin America, the observatories of Santiago de Chile, La Plata and Rio de Janeiro, the Argentine National Observatory and the Tacubaya Observatory, in Mexico, were involved in the project. In this presentation, we present part of the history of the failures and successes of one of the most important collaborative astronomical projects on the planet.