Bosscha Observatory 3.93

Bosscha Observatory is the oldest observatory in Indonesia. The observatory is located in Lembang, West Java, approximately 15km north of Bandung. It is situated on a hilly six hectares of land and is 1310m above mean sea level plateau. The IAU observatory code for Bosscha is 299.HistoryDuring the first meeting of the Nederlandsch-Indische Sterrekundige Vereeniging in the 1920s, it was agreed that an observatory was needed to study astronomy in the Dutch East Indies. Of all locations in the Indonesia archipelago, a tea plantation in Malabar, a few kilometers north of Bandung in West Java was selected. It is on the hilly north side of the city with a non-obstructed view of the sky and with close access to the city that was planned to become the new capital of the Dutch colony, replacing Batavia . The observatory is named after the tea plantation owner Karel Albert Rudolf Bosscha, son of the physicist Johannes Bosscha and a major force in the development of science and technology in the Dutch East Indies, who granted six hectares of his property for the new observatory.