The exception is perhaps the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, whose tercentenary volumes Greenwich Observatory by ForbesE. G.MeadowsA. J.HowseD. (London, 1975) are important and well-known, but still far from exhaustive. The classic study of Paris Observatory is WolfC., Histoire de l'Observatoire de Paris de sa fondation à 1793 (Paris, 1902); more recent studies include DebarbatS.GrillotS.LevyJ., Observatoire de Paris: Son histoire 1667–1963 (Paris, 1984), and (on a quite different scale) ChapinS. L., “The vicissitudes of a scientific institution: A decade of change at the Paris Observatory”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xxi (1990), 235–74. For Pulkovo Observatory Alan H. Batten's recent study is important, Resolute and undertaking characters: The lives of Wilhelm and Otto Struve (Dordrecht, 1988). K. Krisciunas includes some national observatories among his “astronomical centers” in Astronomical centers of the world (Cambridge, 1988), and brief sketches of national observatories are among those found in OwenGingerich (ed.), The general history of astronomy, iv: Astrophysics and twentieth-century astronomy to 1950: Part A (Cambridge, 1984), 109–65. Other secondary sources are cited in the articles in this volume; the best primary sources are usually the early official volumes of the observatories themselves.
2.
DickSteven J., “Pulkovo Observatory and the national observatory movement: An historical overview”, Inertial coordinate systems on the sky: Proceedings of IAU Symposium 141, Leningrad, October 1989, ed. by LieskeJ. H.AbalakinV. K. (Dordrecht, 1990), 29–38.
3.
Adriaan Blaauw discusses the European Southern Observatory in this volume. RobertSmith, The Space Telescope: A study of NASA, science, technology and politics (Cambridge, 1989) addresses the novel problems introduced by placing a ‘national observatory’ in space, problems — it is now all too clear — not all resolved before launch.
