An astronomical observatory at 2,877 meters on the summit of Pic du Midi de Bigorre in the French Pyrenees, begun by the Societe Ramond in 1878 and taken over by the French state in 1882. Observations there disproved the Martian-canal hypothesis in 1909, and in the 1960s Pierre and Janine Connes analyzed the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, work that influenced James Lovelock's early thinking on detecting life on other worlds; its main instrument today is the 2-meter Bernard Lyot Telescope, installed in 1980 as France's largest telescope.
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