The main goal of the Araucaria Project is to improve the calibration of the cosmic distance scale in the local Universe. We trace down environmental dependencies on the brightness of various standard candles by comparing distances to their host galaxies and clusters, obtained with different methods.

Rolf Chini Cerro Murphy Observatory (former Observatory Cerro Armazones) is an international astrophysical project, hosted in European Southern Observatory in Chile, and operated by the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland.