Berlin Observatory
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The Berlin Observatory was an astronomical research institution founded in conjunction with the Electoral Brandenburg Society of Sciences and operated under the subsequent Royal Prussian Society or Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences as the Royal Observatory of Berlin.
From the original location of the old observatory from the year 1711 in the district of Berlin-Dorotheenstadt, in today's Berlin-Mitte, it was moved as a new Berlin observatory in 1835 to Berlin-Friedrichstadt in today's Berlin-Kreuzberg. A second move, out of the further growing Berlin and also because of increasing light pollution, was made in 1913 to Babelsberg Palace Park in what is now Potsdam. As a reference to its origin, the institution was called Observatory Berlin-Babelsberg. After the Second World War, Berlin disappeared from the name. The Babelsberg Observatory was united with the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory and the Einstein Tower Solar Observatory, among others, to form the Central Institute for Astrophysics of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin. After reunification, the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam was founded, whose main location today is the Babelsberg Observatory.
Important astronomers such as Johann Franz Encke, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel and Johann Gottfried Galle worked at the formerly new Berlin observatory. In 1846, the planet Neptune was discovered from here.
New Berlin Observatory, view from the east, after J. F. Encke, 1840
First Berlin observatory on the Marstall in the Dorotheenstadt, view from north
Other Berlin Observatories
Primarily intended for the public was the Urania, founded in 1888, whose Bamberg refractor was moved from Invalidenstraße in Berlin-Mitte to the first location of the Wilhelm Foerster Observatory in Papestraße in Berlin-Schöneberg after its building was destroyed in World War II. In addition to this public observatory, which has been located on the Insulaner since 1963, there are two others in Berlin: the Archenhold Observatory, housed in Berlin-Treptow since the 1896 Trade Exhibition, and the Bruno H. Bürgel Observatory, located in Berlin-Spandau since 1982.
