Survey

Dear Colleagues,

Introduction

There are around 2000 observatories in the world and new ones are added to each passing day. It is, therefore, important to determine suitable locations for new optical observatories. To this end, we have transformed our national work (Aksaker et al. 2015) into a new global project. In this work the most observatory locations in Turkey were determined using only satellite data.

In this new project we aim to find the best sites around the globe by using satellite data in a longer time scale and finer resolution. As an obvious outcome, we will also prepare a list of best locations for each country to be used publicly for amateurs or professionals. Moreover, so far, the relative status of the observatories will be revealed comparatively.

Why a survey is needed

It is a well known fact that there exist many criteria to pin point a location for an observatory, including climatology, geography, infrastructure, accessibility, political stability etc. However, what is not so obvious even long and precise satellite data exist is that, when it comes to choose, to order, to weight layers / criteria, there is no single and common way to do so. Note also that when all criteria are weighted to be important then whole process of "using criteria" will smoothly fail as a whole (eg. if all layers are important then Everest becomes the best location).

Thus, here we quickly ask from researchers, scientists and specialists to value each layer / criteria according to your experience in the field. Note that, no theoretical research has been done on the layer analysis i.e studying a single layer dynamics on its own and calculating a hypothetical "weight/importance/value of the astronomical layer".

Acknowledgement

If you and/or your institution would like to be acknowledged in future potential articles and/or reports of this project then please provide a full text that should appear in the acknowledgement. Unfortunately this will reveal your identity. However, your answers will be separated from what you mention here.

Contact

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