George Merz, Munich 1862.
Focal distance: 320 cm
Aperture: 187 mm

This instrument was named after its first owner, Baron Ercole Dembowski (1812-1881), famous observer of double stars. After his death, it was acquired in 1882 by the Astronomical Observatory of Padua and became the main observing telescope until 1942 when the Asiago Observatory was built. With two instruments similar to this but with larger diameters (25 cm aperture instead of 19) Piero Tacchini in Palermo and Angelo Secchi in Rome, together with Giuseppe Lorenzoni in Padua (who used instead the Starke-Merz refractor) started a series of simultaneous solar observations between the three cities, laying the basis for the establishment of the “Italian Spectroscopists Society”.