A 4-meter optical–IR telescope promises to catapult Turkey into astronomical modernity. The state-of-the-art Eastern Anatolia Observatory (DAG) is also intended to build up the country’s strengths in engineering, data mining, analysis, and modeling. First light is slated for 2019.
The idea for DAG originated with young Turkish astronomers who were frustrated with the light pollution and other limitations of the 1.5-m and smaller telescopes at the national observatory near the coastal city of Antalya in southern Turkey. Around the same time, in the late 2000s, Cahit Yesilyaprak, now principal investigator for DAG, was making observations of weather conditions outside Erzurum, a few hundred kilometers from Turkey’s borders with Armenia and Iran. The conditions looked good for a telescope, and he and colleagues proposed to build “the biggest telescope in Turkey, from scratch,” as project spokesman Sinan Kaan Yerli puts it. “We will switch from 1.5 meters to 4 meters, and...
