Washerwomen On Calton Hill, Thomas Begbie, 1887, c/o City of Edinburgh Council – Museums and Galleries www.capitalcollections.org.uk
It took another four decades for this project to be realised in the form of a new building designed by William Henry Playfair in 1818. The arrival of this temple to scientific innovation and discovery on Calton Hill marked a defining point in Scotland’s self-identity, as it sought greater prominence within Britain and its rapidly-expanding global empire.
Astronomy
On the west side of the site stands the unremarkable-looking Transit House, a small predecessor of Playfair’s observatory from 1812, which once housed an instrument for observing the transit of stars across the meridian. A larger version of this transit telescope was installed in the new observatory in 1831 and survives to this day, along with a 6-inch refracting telescope housed in the McEwan Dome on the observatory’s top floor.
Thomas Henderson and later Charles Piazzi Smyth led operations at the observatory for much of the 19th century under the title of Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Having been designated a Royal Observatory for most of its life, the site lost this moniker to the observatory on Blackford Hill in 1896, in part due to rising levels of light pollution from the New Town. Re-designated as the City Observatory, with the addition of a striking new Dome on the north-east corner of the site, the observatory was run by the amateur Astronomical Society of Edinburgh from the late 1930s until its closure in 2009.
