Berlin Observatory
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The Berlin Observatory is a German astronomical institution with a series of observatories and related organizations in and around the city of Berlin in Germany, starting from the 18th century. It has its origins in 1700 when Gottfried Leibniz initiated the "Brandenburg Society of Science″ which would later (1744) become the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The Society had no observatory but nevertheless an astronomer, Gottfried Kirch, who observed from a private observatory in Berlin. A first small observatory was furnished in 1711, financing itself by calendrical computations.
1838 painting of the New Berlin Observatory (Linden Street), where the planet Neptune was discovered in 1846.
By 1913, activities were moved to a new Observatory at Babelsberg, shown here in 2006
The royal stables and the observatory, watercolor painting by Leopold Ludwig Müller, 1824
Tower of the old Berlin Observatory between 1832 and 1848, with signal mast of the optical telegraph. View from the west, by F. W. Klose
Gottfried Kirch
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Gottfried Kirch was a German astronomer and the first "Astronomer Royal" in Berlin and, as such, director of the nascent Berlin Observatory.
Gottfried Kirch