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.
Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
The site of the observatory was chosen on a hill south of Potsdam, the Telegrafenberg, on which had been, from 1832 to 1848, a relay station of the military telegraph from Berlin to Koblenz. On 1 July 1874 the AOP was founded. Even before the construction of the observatory had started in the autumn of 1876, solar observations were being made from the tower of the former military orphanage in Linden Street in Potsdam by Gustav Spörer. The construction work started in 1876; the main observatory building and its equipment were finished in the autumn of 1879.