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.
Berlin Observatory
The first of the new instruments arrived in spring 1914. In the year after, the placing of a 65 cm refractor was completed; it was the first large astronomical instrument from Carl Zeiss in Jena. In 1924 followed the completion of a 120 cm reflecting telescope, at the time the second-largest telescope in the world and the largest in Europe. After the Second World War, the reflecting telescope was dismantled and was shipped off to the Soviet Union as reparations (a fate shared by other observing instruments) It was sent to the Crimea complete with its dome;– to reconstruct the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, Simejis, destroyed in the war. – where it is still in service today. In 2002, the remaining torso of the building was fully restored and completed and received a new dome; since then the library of the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam has been accommodated there.