User:Лорд Бъмбъри/WikiDojo at CEE Meeting 2015

Tartu Old Observatory is a historical observatory of Imperial University of Dorpat, which is located at the foot of the Cathedral Hill in Tartu, Estonia.

History
Astronomy in Tartu has a long history, dating back to at least 1692. The observatory was founded in in 1802 with the reopening of University of Tartu. . Initially, the university had only a temporary facility before the equipment was installed in it's original observatory. The observatory construction contruction started on the southeast part of Cathedral Hill in 1808 and was completed in 1810.

In 1950 it was replaced by a new building, see Tartu Observatory.

Previous educational establishments of Dorpat: Academia Gustaviana and Academia Gustavo-Carolina did not have their separate observatories during the 17th century, although the astronomy did belong to their teaching programmes. A first telescope was bought in England by a Professor of Mathematics, Sven Dimberg. The instrument was 12 cubits long and it was a 6 metre refractor telescope with tubes fitting into each other. When the university moved to Pärnu in 1699, they planned to erect an observatory in Pärnu, but one was never built.

In 1813 Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve was appointed as chief astronomer there.

The instruments were installed in 1814 by von Struve who subsequently started observations. In 1824, a 9" Fraunhofer refractor arrived, the largest achromatic telescope in the world at the time. When von Struve began assembling his Geodetic Arc in 1816, the doorstep of the observatory became its first point.

Soviet Union period
From 1952 till 1975 beside being an observatory Tartu was also host city to the physics department of Estonia and in that period there were done some experiments in solid matter physics. There are two important papers written at that time, the first one was written in 1966 by Elmar Vesman the μ-molecular ion (ddu)+ resonance mechanism and the second one was by Vladimir Hižnjakov, Karl Rebane and Peter Saari who discovered the phenomenon of photo luminescence.

Architecture
The old observatory in Tartu is a nineteenth century one-dome observatory.