Turns out they are celebrating their 100 year anniversary this year. They were founded as a municipal observatory (!), upon an initiative by local astronomer Cuno Hoffmeister, by the city of Sonneberg.
Back then the city seems to have had the money. It used to be a center of toy production, evidence of which can still be found in the fact that it hosts the German Toy Museum. They also produced and exported lots of Christmas decorations, with Woolworth building a major warehouse right in the city.
The observatory’s main activity were two long-term photographic surveys, monitoring the whole visible sky and select fields whenever possible. These were used to identify variable stars, with about 11000 (a quarter of all known ones) discovered in Sonneberg.
Consequently, it has one of the biggest archives of photographic plates, several 100k in total. With a smart filling system in which the position along the shelve corresponds to right ascension and height in the shelve to declination (and then year of observation). 85% of these have been digitized.
I also saw the library and their original bibliographic catalogue on variable stars. Each star got a card, and whenever a new publication mentioned it the reference was added to the card. This was maintained into the 1990s, got digitized and became part of the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center.
There’s a lot of history that left an imprint at the observatory. Started before WWII, used for weather observations during the war, continued astronomy under Soviet occupation but lost many instruments, was associated to @aippotsdam.bsky.social precursor institutes a couple times.
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