York Gardens Observatory - Octagonal Building - York, Great Britain. - Octagon Buildings on Waymarking.com

"The York Observatory was built by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society following the inaugural meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831. It is located in the York Museum Gardens near the Yorkshire Museum which was built in 1830 to house geological and archaeological collections. The observatory has an earlier rotating roof designed by John Smeaton who also designed the Eddystone Lighthouse. The observatory was restored and refitted to mark the British Association's 150th anniversary meeting in York in 1981 and was officially opened by its President, HRH the Duke of Kent. The observatory houses what was for many years the largest refracting telescope in the world (4 ½ inch) designed and built by Thomas Cook of York, whose firm also built the Greenwich transit instrument. A plaque on the building gives the latitude as 53 degrees 57 min 40 sec N and longitude as 1 degree 5 min 12 sec W.

Its 4 inch refractor telescope was built by York man Thomas Cooke in 1850, who went on to make the then-largest telescope in the world. It was installed in 1981 when the observatory was restored.

The Observatory also houses an 1811 clock which tells the time based on observations of the positions of stars. It was once the clock by which all others in York were set and is still always four minutes, 20 seconds, behind Greenwich Mean Time. In the mid 19th century it would cost sixpence to check a timepiece against the Observatory Clock.

During the 1780s leading astronomers John Goodricke and Edward Pigott were based in York and laid the foundations of variable star astronomy, this is the study of stars of varying brightness.

Goodricke has a college at the University of York named after him and Pigott was the first English man to discover a comet then have it named after him." Text Source: (visit link)

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