About

The Graduate Program of the National Observatory was initially credited by the Federal Council of Education (CFE) through the Report 05/73 of 01/22/1973. It was later credited by the CFE for the area of Astronomy at the M.Sc. and Ph.D. levels through the Report 755/93 of 12/06/1993. 

The Graduate Program in Astronomy aims to complement and enhance the training in astronomy of undergraduate students in the areas of Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy and related sciences, seeking to form highly qualified researchers and professionals well prepared for the job market. The Program has two main areas of concentration, Astronomy and Astrophysics, with different sub-areas. 

Since its creation, the Program has formed 143 M.Sc. and 118 Ph.D. in Astronomy, many of which currently occupy featured positions in the scientific community, both national and international.  

Infrastructure and resources

The Graduate Program has 11 spacious offices for students of the courses in Astronomy and Geophysics, with capacity for 60 people, each with a desk and individual computer, as well as two classrooms and an auditorium with capacity for 110 people. 

Students in the Program have the opportunity to use observational resources provided by the ON, like the Observatório Astronômico do Sertão de Itaparica (OASI), and by other observatories and telescopes in Brazil and abroad. Among them most used ones, there is Pico do Dias (Brazil), Gemini North and South (Chile and Hawaii), SOAR (Chile), European Southern Observatory - ESO (Chile), Roque de los Muchachos (Canary Islands), Calar Alto (Spain), Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (Canary Islands). In addition, students also benefit from the participation of the National Observatory in major national and international projects and collaborations, such as the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey - J-PAS (Spain), the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey - J-PLUS (Spain), the Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey - S-PLUS (ON and USP), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - SDSS-III (USA and other countries), the Dark Energy Survey - DES (USA and other countries), and the Physics of Extreme Massive Stars - POEMS (Czech Rep. and other countries). 

The students have access to printers and applications for data, image and text processing. The Graduate Program’s computers are connected to the Observatory’s network, allowing students to leverage the IT infrastructure from the other departments, in particular the high performance servers and clusters. All the students have access to the Internet with individual e-mail address. 

Access to specialized bibliography is done through the Observatory’s library, whose collection includes more than 16,000 books (including 2,000 rare books) as well as 400 titles of periodic journals and specialized magazines, 64 of which are acquired on a regular basis. This collection is complementary to the electronic access to the “Portal de Periódicos” of CAPES, which is the main source of bibliographic reference for the preparation of theses and dissertations. 

Over the last years, the Program has made efforts to achieve a greater national and international visibility. Among these, we may highlight: 

• organization of an annual international advanced school, called Special Courses at the National Observatory; 
• increasing the admission of students from other states of Brazil, mainly from the Northeast, as well as from several countries in Latin America, who look for our Program to carry on their studies; 
• maintaining several academic exchange agreements with foreign institutions, that allow the supervision of Ph.D. thesis under the regime of co-advisory; 
• the sandwich doctoral program and other short-term visit agreements, that the Observatory maintains with several foreign institutions of excellence, so as to receive our students every year. Among others, we can mention the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain), the University of Pittsburgh (USA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalusia (Spain), the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), just to mention some who received our students in recent years.

For more information, contact the Secretariat of the Graduate Programs.