When it comes to observatories in Budapest, everyone thinks of the Planetarium, but there is another institute up in the Buda Hills.
This is Svábhegy Observatory, that has been closed in the past years due to a renovation, but now it awaits everyone with a renewed website and program offer, only a few minutes from Normafa. It's really worth visiting, because they have the country's largest binocular that can be used to view galaxies, interstellar gas nebulae, sunbursts or moon craters, so basically everything we could imagine.
They have daytime and nighttime demonstrations, H-alpha binoculars to look at details of the sun's surface, and at night we can see moon craters, Jupiter moons and clouds, Saturn's ring, interstellar nebulae and the exploded star remnants. Astronomers give lectures, shows experiments, and even some meteorites can be hand-held or study the material of the shooting stars under microscope.
About the place: The decision to establish an observatory in the Buda Hills was made in 1920, and by 1928 the largest observatory dome of the park, the „Budapest dome”, was completed: the 60 cm Zeiss-Heyde mirrored binoculars were the largest in the country at that time and still a pretty impressive thing.
