Seminar
The Iranian National Observatory project and its science case

Abstract

The plan of the Iranian National Observatory (INO) is to build within the next 5 years an active 3 meter telescope with a possible adaptive secondary on a mountain with more than 3000m height. We plan to have a remote-access and encourage the international community of astronomers to cooperate and to use up to 70% of the observing time. For the optical design and the first instruments we focus on few topics of astronomy. In the first part of my talk I will give a status report of this project and review the current proposals for the science case. In the second part of my talk I will introduce my own research interest and talk about the voids in the large scale structure of the universe. We have done studies on the systematics of void search algorithms in 2D galaxy samples, a 3D void analysis of the SDSS data release 6, and some approaches for theoretical modeling of the void properties and statistics. The Iranian National Observatory project and its science case