On one of our free days in Melbourne, Australia last month we visited the city’s Royal Botanic Gardens, which also happens to be the site of the old Melbourne Observatory. Back in the day it was probably a pretty nice dark-sky site, situated on a hill above the fledgling city. But, the thing that probably made it even more enticing to the Government Astronomers assigned to preside over the observatory was the fact that it came with a house! And, a very nice, snug brick structure it appears to be.

There were three GOs who served the observatory in its early years: Robert Ellery, Pietro Baracchi, and Joseph Baldwin. They’re described on a nice glass panel outside the observatory and presumably all lived in this nice house during their tenures. (If you want to read more about the Melbourne Observatory in its heydey, go here.)

As I walked around the house, I thought about what it must have been like in the days when the place was a productive observatory. Nowadays it’s used for a few public stargazing sessions, but its most productive telescope was removed some years ago and sent to Mt Stromlo in New South Wales, where the skies were darker. Unfortunately, that telescope was destroyed in the 2003 bush fires that gutted so much of Mt Stromlo. But, in its day, the 48-inch telescope at Melbourne was involved in the cutting-edge astronomy of the times (the mid-1800s onward until the telescope’s relocation in 1945).

I wonder what it was like to live on top of the city at that time, with a nice house and a state-of-the-art telescope at one’s disposal? For sure there are other astronomer’s houses at observatories, but this one piqued my curiousity about the men who operated this place and the home they lived in. Today’s astronomers (men and women) don’t always live at their observatories, although some do go to the mountain to get their data. But most don’t have fine homes provided by the government as part of their pay for such duties. A pity to lose such an elegant way to treat our cutting-edge scientists!