Strasbourg Observatory, Strasbourg, France. Strasbourg Observatory was built between 1877 and 1881 when the city was part of the German Empire. It was built as a showcase observatory to house the 49 centimetre refractor telescope (the largest in the German Empire at the time). The European Space Agency's Hipparcos (High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite) astronomy mission was born here and today the observatory studies stellar evolution and coordinates major astronomical databases.