page_title: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
section_title: Relocation of the Berlin Observatory to Babelsberg
hierarchical_section_title: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam / History / Relocation of the Berlin Observatory to Babelsberg
caption_attribution_description: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics
context_page_description: Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam is a German research institute. It is the successor of the Berlin Observatory founded in 1700 and of the Astrophysical Observatory Potsdam founded in 1874. The latter was the world's first observatory to emphasize explicitly the research area of astrophysics. The AIP was founded in 1992, in a re-structuring following the German reunification.
  The AIP is privately funded and member of the Leibniz Association. It is located in Babelsberg in the state of Brandenburg, just west of Berlin, though the Einstein Tower solar observatory and the great refractor telescope on Telegrafenberg in Potsdam belong to the AIP.
  The key topics of the AIP are cosmic magnetic fields on various scales and extragalactic astrophysics. Astronomical and astrophysical fields studied at the AIP range from solar and stellar physics to stellar and galactic evolution to cosmology.
  The institute also develops research technology in the fields of spectroscopy and robotic telescopes.
context_section_description: At the end of the 19th century the Berlin Observatory, originally built outside the border of the town, was enclosed by blocks of flats, so scientific observations were almost impossible. Therefore, Foerster proposed the removal of the observatory to a place outside Berlin with better observational conditions. In 1904 he appointed Karl Hermann Struve, former director of the observatory of Königsberg, as his successor to realize this project.
  After test observations by Paul Guthnick in the summer of 1906 a new site was found on a hill in the eastern part of the Royal Park of Babelsberg. The ground was placed at the observatory's disposal by the crown free of charge. The costs of the new buildings and the new instruments amounted to 1.5 million Goldmark and could be covered by selling the landed property of the Berlin Observatory. The old observatory built by Schinkel was pulled down later. In June 1911 the construction of a new observatory began in Babelsberg and on 2 August 1913 the removal from Berlin to Babelsberg was complete.
  The first new instruments were delivered in the spring of 1914. The 65 cm refractor — the first big astronomical instrument manufactured by the famous enterprise of Carl Zeiss Jena — was mounted in 1915, whereas the completion of the 122 cm reflector telescope was delayed until 1924 by the First World War. Struve died in 1920 from an accident, and his successor was Paul Guthnick, who introduced in 1913 photoelectric photometry into astronomy as the first objective method of measuring the brightness of stars. When the 122 cm telescope (at this time the second largest in the world) was finished, the Babelsberg Observatory was the best-equipped observatory of Europe.
  The development of the photoelectric method for investigating weakly variable stars and spectroscopic investigations with the 122 cm telescope made the Babelsberg observatory well-known beyond Europe, too.
  At the beginning of 1931 the Sonneberg Observatory founded by Cuno Hoffmeister was attached to the Babelsberg Observatory. For more than 60 years a photographic sky survey was carried out, which represents the second largest archive of astronomical photographic plates. This archive and the discovery and investigation of variable stars popularized the name Sonneberg all over the astronomical world.
  With the beginning of the fascist regime, the fortunes of astronomy in Potsdam as well as in Babelsberg started to decline. The banishment of Jewish co-workers played an essential role in this process. The beginning of the Second World War practically marked the cessation of astronomical research.
caption: Institute buildings in Babelsberg
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