Wise Observatory

The Florence and George Wise Observatory is an astronomical observatory of the University of Tel Aviv. It is located on a 875 m high hill, 5 km west of the town of Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev desert near the Ramon Crater and is the only purely scientific observatory used in Israel.

It was created through a collaboration between the University and the Smithsonian Institution in 1971 and is named in honor of the first president of the university and his wife. It has a reflecting telescope manufacturer Boller and Chivens with a diameter of about 1 meter and a smaller 45 - cm telescope.

Research areas at the Wise Observatory are supernovae, the search for extrasolar planets, as well as the detection of asteroids and comets.