List of astronomical observatories
Name Established Location
Fabra Observatory 1906 Barcelona , Spain
Fan Mountain Observatory 1966 Albemarle County , Virginia , USA
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope 2013 Duyun , Pingtang County , Guizhou Province , China
Félix Aguilar Observatory 1965 San Juan , Argentina
Fernbank Observatory Atlanta , Georgia , USA
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope 2008 Orbit
Fick Observatory 1966 Boone , Iowa , USA
Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory ( defunct ) 1976 - 2011 New Salem , Massachusetts , USA
Flarestar Observatory San Gwann , Malta
Foggy Bottom Observatory 1951 Hamilton , New York , USA
Foothill Observatory Los Altos Hills , California , USA
Ford Observatory 1998 Ithaca , New York , USA
Fox Observatory Sunrise , Florida , USA
Fox Park Public Observatory 1999 Potterville , Michigan , USA
Francis Marion University Observatory 1982 Florence , South Carolina , USA
Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory 1968 Mount Hopkins , Arizona , USA
Fremont Peak Observatory 1986 San Juan Bautista , California , USA
Frosty Drew Observatory 1980s Charlestown , Rhode Island , USA
Fuertes Observatory 1917 Ithaca , New York , USA
F
Fabra Observatory Fuertes Observatory
This is a list of astronomical observatories ordered by name, along with initial dates of operation (where an accurate date is available) and location. The list also includes a final year of operation for many observatories that are no longer in operation. While other sciences, such as volcanology and meteorology, also use facilities called observatories for research and observations, this list is limited to observatories that are used to observe celestial objects. Astronomical observatories are mainly divided into four categories: space-based, airborne, ground-based, and underground-based. Many modern telescopes and observatories are located in space to observe astronomical objects in wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that cannot penetrate the Earth's atmosphere (such as ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and gamma rays) and are thus impossible to observe using ground-based telescopes. Being above the atmosphere, these space observatories can also avoid the effects of atmospheric turbulence that plague ground based telescopes, although new generations of adaptive optics telescopes have since then dramatically improved the situation on the ground. The space high vacuum environment also frees the detectors from the ancestral diurnal cycle due to the atmospheric blue light background of the sky, thereby increasing significantly the observation time. An intermediate variant is the airborne observatory, specialised in the infrared wavelengths of the EM spectrum, that conduct observations above the part of the atmosphere containing water vapor that absorbs them, in the stratosphere. Historically, astronomical observatories consisted generally in a building or group of buildings where observations of astronomical objects such as sunspots, planets, asteroids, comets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies in the visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum were conducted. At first, for millennia, astronomical observations have been made with naked eyes. Then with the discovery of optics, with the help of different types of refractor telescopes and later with reflector telescopes. Their use allowed to dramatically increase both the collecting power and limit of resolution, thus the brightness, level of detail and apparent angular size of distant celestial objects allowing them to be better studied and understood.