OBSERVATORY • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Observatory

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/əbzˈərvətˌɔri/ Listen

noun

Observatory n. (pl. observatories)

A place or building for making observations on the heavenly bodies. "The new observatory in Greenwich Park."

A building fitted with instruments for making systematic observations of any particular class or series of natural phenomena.

A place, as an elevated chamber, from which a view may be observed or commanded.

(Mil.) A lookout on a flank of a battery whence an officer can note the range and effect of the fire; usually referred to as an observation post.

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Etymology of 'Observatory'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Observatory" Quotes from Famous Books

... very highly, and entreated me frequently to visit him. I have become more and more acquainted with his poetical temperament, and I fancy that he too will understand mine. We are very dissimilar, but we both strive after the same object. Before we separated he conducted me to his little observatory; now his dearest world. He seems now to live for poetry and now for philosophy, andufor which I fancy he is least of all calculated—for astronomy. I ...

— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... of events, some of the many plans suggested are even now of curious interest. The establishment of a magnificent national library at the Capital; the founding of a great university; of a normal school; a post graduate school; and astronomical observatory "equal to any in the world," are a few of the plans from time to ...

— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... great success in an account of a balloon voyage from England to America, in seventy-five hours, by Mr. Monck Mason,[233] Mr. Harrison Ainsworth,[234] and others. I have no doubt that M. Nicollet was the author of the Moon hoax,[235] written in a way which marks the practised observatory astronomer beyond all doubt, and by evidence seen in the most minute details. Nicollet had an eye to Europe. I suspect that he took Poe's story, and made it a basis for his own. Mr. Locke, it would seem, when he attempted ...

— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... investigations ever undertaken by a single institution was that of classifying the stars as to their spectra, over the entire sky, substantially down to and including the stars of eighth magnitude, by the Harvard College Observatory, as a memorial to the lamented Henry Draper. Professor Pickering and his associates have formulated a classification system which is now in universal use. It starts with the bright-line nebulae, passes to the bright-line stars, and then to the stars in ...

— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... assist those who may wish to recognize for themselves these other worlds in the sky, this book presents a special series of charts to illustrate a method of finding the planets which requires no observatory and no instruments, and only such knowledge of the starry heavens ...

— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

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