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.
Göttingen Observatory
In 1941, during World War II, Paul ten Bruggencate became the director of the Göttingen University Observatory. In pursuit of his interest in observing the Sun, he looked for a new solar telescope. With the help of the military, he was able to build a solar telescope near the already existing telescope at Hainberg. Unsatisfied with the cloudy weather conditions in Germany, ten Bruggencate established another solar observatory in Switzerland: the Locarno Observatory was planned and built in the late 1950s. It was closed in 1984 and the equipment was transferred to the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, Spain, where the University of Göttingen now shares the operation of several solar telescopes.