Bucharest Observatory
heritage site in Bucharest, Romania
The Bucharest Observatory is an astronomical observatory located at no. 21 Lascăr Catargiu Boulevard, Bucharest, Romania. It is Bucharest's only observatory open to the public.
History
The observatory was built between 1908 and 1910, for Admiral Vasile Urseanu, president of the Romanian Astronomical Society "Camille Flammarion". It was equipped with a 150 mm diameter Zeiss telescope with a focal length of 2.7 meters; the telescope was the third largest in Romania at the time. Ion D. Berindey was the architect.
The observatory founded by Urseanu was frequented by amateur astronomers; professional researchers worked at the Bucharest Astronomical Observatory, founded by Nicolae Coculescu and located on Filaret Hill in Carol Park. Following the death of Admiral Urseanu in 1926, the telescope was dismantled and stored in the basement of the building. In 1933, Urseanu's widow donated the building to the municipality of Bucharest, which used it as a pinacotheca. In 1949, the paintings were transferred to other museums.
“Bucharest Observatory” enters the record as heritage site in Bucharest, Romania. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bucharest, Observatory and heritage can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bucharest Observatory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.