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Shanghai Astronomical Museum celebrates 20 yearsHome to China’s first large astronomical telescope
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The Shanghai Astronomy Museum is housed in a French-style building from the late 19th century, featuring 4.8-meter-high ceilings and fireplaces preserved in every room. The roof tiles, shipped from Marseille over a century ago, still bear French inscriptions that read “Marseille.”
As China’s first large astronomical telescope — Asia’s largest at the time — a 40-centimeter double refracting telescope, housed under a 10-meter dome capable of 360-degree rotation and equipped with an operable skylight, features dual tubes, each with a 40-centimeter aperture, designed for simultaneous observation and photography.
The telescope has captured countless iconic moments in China’s astronomical history:
1901: It photographed a crescent moon with such clarity that lunar craters were distinctly visible — the earliest lunar photograph taken with an optical telescope in China.
1907: It documented a solar eclipse, marking the first use of a telescope to photograph this phenomenon in Chinese history.
1910 and 1986: It observed Halley’s Comet twice, a celestial body first discovered as a periodic comet, returning near the Sun roughly every 76 years. With its full functionality restored, this century-old telescope is on track to become the world’s only one to photograph Halley’s Comet’s return for a third time in 2061.
Above the observatory, a staircase descends into a treasure trove — the museum’s archive of over 7,000 original astronomical plates, taken with this historic telescope. These plates, now digitized for preservation, hold invaluable records of the stars and beyond.
The museum also houses a Palan Meridian Instrument, once used to record the precise moments stars crossed the meridian.
The International Longitude Campaigns of 1926 and 1933 included the instrument, and in 1964-65, it was moved to Sanya, Hainan Province, for site selection observations.
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