1. Sternberg Astronomical Institute of Lomonosov Moscow State University

2. Festival of Science - 2014 September evening observations + October scientific-popular lectures

3. SAI MSU is 186 years old. Now we have more than 150 scientists Our advantage always was combination of theoretical and observational investigations. But after the disintegration of the Soviet Union observatories of MSU in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were nationalized and our students and scientists almost completely lost the possibility to check their theoretical predictions by themselves. This situation has started to change 7 years ago when two large observational projects were initiated by the University and two of them we will describe in brief in our talk.

4. Northern Caucasus mountains observatory of SAI MSU (40 km southward from Kislovods town)

5. The main instrument of this observatory is 2,5 meter telescope equipped with modern detectors of optical and infrared radiation. Four additional 1-meter class telescope will be also installed. We hope to have “the first light” from 2.5 m telescope in the nearest future.

6. The «environmental niche» of the observatory. 1) There are a dozen of 8-11 m class telescopes in the word, but typical telescope’s mirrors of Western universities has 2-3 meter in diameter. 2) The telescope is the third largest telescope of Russia 3) Now only we have IR panoramic camera and spectrograph International collaboration is the main road of science and we hope that Russia will became a member of ESO. So the aim of our observatory is to prepare students for future work at large telescopes.

7. Two mainstreams of the modern astronomy: 1)Large telescopes with small field of view 2)Robotic wide field telescopes

8. GLOBAL M A S T E R Robotic Net (Mobile Astronomical System of the TElescope-Robots)

9. Scientific goal -- search for all kinds of transients: optical emission of gamma-ray bursts, supernova explosion, variable stars, asteroids, cosmic debris etc…

11. There are more experimental projects in progress in the institute: ● multi wave band photometric survey onboard of International Space Station (LIRA-B project) ● new generation of fine guide space sensors ● gravitation wave experiment OGRAN ● the net of gravimetric stations at Northern Caucasus mountains ets…

12. THANK YOU ! Sergei Lamzin, lamzin@sai.msu.ru, +7-916-252-01-53lamzin@sai.msu.ru