Berlin Observatory
The Berlin Observatory (Berliner Sternwarte) 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″ ("Sozietät der Wissenschaften") which would later (1744) become the Prussian Academy of Sciences ("Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften"). 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.
Mannheim Observatory
The running of the Mannheim Observatory by Catholic Orders was now over. In the years up to the Baden Revolution in 1848 the observatory declined. Famous astronomers were not retained, such as Heinrich Christian Schumacher (Director 1813-1815), founder of the oldest existing journal of astronomy, "Astronomische Nachrichten", and of the Altona Observatory. Friedrich Wilhelm Struve, founder and first director of Pulkovo Observatory at St. Petersburg, despite being interested was deterred by clumsy personnel policy. From 1816 until his death in 1846 Bernhard Nicolai was Court Astronomer, being mainly dedicated to the orbits of comets. In his time, amongst other things, a three-stage refracting telescope was purchased from Fraunhofer, which was later used by the German expeditions of 1874 and 1882 to observe the Transit of Venus.