Eleven Observatories From Berlin in 1700 to the Roman Space Telescope in 2026

Founded in Berlin in 1700 and best known for the 1846 discovery of Neptune there by Johann Gottfried Galle, working from calculations by Urbain Le Verrier. Its main instrument was a refractor from the Munich workshop of Joseph von Fraunhofer, and its functions were later spread across several successor institutions.

The University of Vienna observatory began in 1753 and 1754 on the roof of a university building. Its current building, finished in 1883, was the largest observatory in the world by floor area at the time, and the site once held the world largest refracting telescope.

Opened in 1956 in the Sologne region of Cher, France, this radio observatory works between 1.1 and 3.5 gigahertz on continuum and spectral line emission. Its large fixed-mirror telescope sits between a steerable dish and a transit instrument in design.

Its 37-meter antenna began operating in 1964 for the US military, and MIT now runs the site at Westford, Massachusetts as a radio science center. It helped develop Very Long Baseline Interferometry and later joined the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration.

Established in 1964 as an extension of the older Helwan observatory, it sits about 80 kilometers from Cairo. Its main mirror measures about 1.88 meters, making it the largest reflecting telescope in the Arab world, the Middle East and North Africa.

Founded in October 1971 as a collaboration between Tel Aviv University and the Smithsonian Institution, it stands in the Negev desert near Mitzpe Ramon. It is Israel only professional observatory and serves mainly university staff and graduate students.

On Mount Bohyeon near Yeongcheon, South Korea, this observatory dates from 1996 and belongs to the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. It is a member of the East-Asian Planet Search Network, with a 2 meter class telescope and a high dispersion spectrograph, and its dome appears on the 10,000 won banknote.

High on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps, the antennas act as one stationary telescope by interferometry, with a correlator combining their signals into images. Expanded from the original Plateau de Bure array, it is described as the most powerful millimeter wavelength radio telescope in the Northern Hemisphere.

A network of radio observatories linked by very long baseline interferometry into an Earth-sized instrument. It released the first image of M87* and then, on 12 May 2022, the first image of Sagittarius A*, which is about four million times the mass of the Sun and roughly 27,000 light-years away.

An intergovernmental radio telescope project being built in Australia for low frequencies and in South Africa for mid frequencies. When complete it is meant to link thousands of antennas and dishes into roughly a square kilometer of collecting area.

A NASA infrared space telescope launched on 30 August 2026 toward a Sun-Earth L2 orbit. It is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA first chief astronomer, and pairs a Hubble-class mirror with a much wider field of view for surveys of dark energy and exoplanets.