Stockholm Observatory [Stockholms Observatorium] is beautifully located in the archipelago 18 km southeast of Stockholm. The Research Station for Astrophysics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademien - KVA] is also located at Stockholm Observatory. The scientific staff, during 1997-98, included five professors, eight associate professors and senior researchers, one university lecturer, seven research associates and four postdoctoral fellows. About 1/3 of the staff is of foreign nationality.
At Stockholm Observatory observational, theoretical and experimental work is carried out. The fields of research include the interstellar medium and star formation, young stars and planetary systems, solar physics, AGB-stars and planetary nebulae, supernovae, galactic structure and dynamics, observational cosmology, high energy astrophysics (including research on active galactic nuclei, Galactic X-ray binaries, gamma-ray bursts, and pulsars), as well as infrared equipment development. Stockholm Observatory has access to all European Southern Observatory (ESO) instruments, the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), the Swedish solar telescope on La Palma, the Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST) and the Onsala telescopes, and European Space Agency (ESA) projects such as Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), the astrometry satellite HIPPARCOS, X-ray Multimirror Mission (XMM), as well as being involved in the Odin satellite project and ESA's International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL). Other instruments, such as the Keck telescope, the Very Large Array (VLA) the Australia Telescope (AT), the IRAM PdB mm-wave interferometer as well as the space based Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA), and the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) are also extensively used.