OREANDA-NEWS. September 13, 2011. Tartu Observatory opened its doors to the public as a museum in 2011, giving visitors the chance to hold in their hands meteorites that fell to Earth in 1947 and, on clear nights, view our neighbouring planets and the Moon in all their glory – using the Zeiss telescope that scientists have been using for the same purpose since 1912.

Tartu Observatory will also be putting on planetarium shows. The guides can be preordered in English and Russian. The interactive touch screens have alsoLatvian language.

The observatory has two main halls. The East Hall hosts an exhibition dedicated to the measuring of the Earth and the heavens, The West Hall charts the development of astronomy from the second half of the 19th century to the present day – from the rise of astrophysics to the discovery of the great structures of the universe. There is also a clock room which shows how the right time was kept by the observatory in the period between the two world wars.