Built for star-gazing

Even though I find thinking about outer space a bit scary and stressful, I absolutely love observatories from a design and function perspective. There is something lovely about a building constructed entirely for looking at stars.

Griffith Observatory in California [Credit: unkown]

Teide Observatory in Tenerife [Credit: Tenerife Tourism]

Royal Greenwich Observatory [Credit: philsphotoweb]

When I was a child, my parents were professors at the University of Oxford, and my father's office was in the converted dome of the Radcliffe Observatory at Green College. The roof was permanently closed, but the crank to turn the roof still functioned, so on special occasions my dad would let me brother and I go up and turn it. It was so magical!

The green dome where my father had his office, Green College, Oxford [Credit: P. Vojtechovsky]

Do observatories capture your imagination the way they do mine?