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.
Gottfried Kirch
Then in 1700 he was appointed the first astronomer of the Royal Society of Sciences (″Kurfürstlich-Brandenburgische Societät der Wissenschaften″) in Berlin on 10 May by Prince-elector Friedrich III. of Brandenburg (since 1701: King Friedrich I. of Prussia). The founding of the associated Berlin Observatory was a reaction to the new national observatories in Greenwich, Paris and St. Petersburg. To finance the Academy, the Prince-Elector conferred the "Kalenderpatent" on it (a monopoly on publishing almanacs). Kirch and his wife therefore were obliged to also finance the Academy by their almanac calculations.