Founding of Tartu Observatory

Tartu Observatory is Estonia's national astronomical observatory, located at Tõravere, a few kilometres from the university city of Tartu. The new site was developed in the 1960s to replace the older university observatory in the city, which had been used since the early nineteenth century by astronomers including Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, who did pioneering work on double stars and the distance to a star. Today the observatory is a research centre for astrophysics, remote sensing and the Earth's atmosphere and it is home to Estonia's largest telescope, a 1.5-metre reflector. It also takes part in the country's space projects.

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