The 1.56m astrometric telescope (Fig. 1) is designed mainly for determining trigonometric parallaxes of faint stars.

In order to keep the design as simple as possible, the telescope has only a Ritchey-Chretien focus and will accomodate plates 200 × 200 mm. We also plan to design several pieces of auxiliary equipment such as a medium dispersion grating spectrograph, a photometer, a reducing camera, and an electrographic camera, all of which are in the second stage of engineering. The whole project consists of four parts.