The highest astronomical laboratory in the Middle East will be located in Lebanon.

A team of Lebanese academic scientists has begun the project of creating the highest astronomy laboratory in the Middle East, according to the Russian agency "TASS".

Roger Najjar, professor of astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame, said the astronomical science center will be built at 3,000 meters altitude at the top of a mountain on the outskirts of Bcharre. It is characterized by its former observatory, established in the nineteenth century on the campus of the American University of Beirut.

According to the Lebanese scientist, only five laboratories have been installed in the world at an altitude higher than that of the astronomical center of Bcharre and these observatories in Switzerland, Ethiopia, India, Chile and the Hawaiian Islands.
Najjar said that teachers and students on his team set up a 60-centimeter observatory in Bcharre that Japan had given them and made astronomical observations there.

As one of the founders of Sky Optics in Beirut, Najjar pointed out that Lebanon's interest in astronomy had increased since 2013, with sales of observatories rising from 30 to 700 observatories a year, attracting the attention of the International Astronomical Union, which decided to encourage local "astrologers" and authorize them. By giving two Lebanese Arabic names to an unnamed star and a planet in orbit around it.