What is an Observatory?

Telescopes need to be in places where the sky is dark at night and the weather is good. The tops of mountains are good places, as you can see in the pictures.

Also, astronomers often need to use different telescopes to look at different things. A telescope that is good for looking at the Moon may not be very good for looking at stars and so on.

So, several different telescopes can be built together in the same place. We call this an Observatory.

The Schools' Observatory is a little bit different. It is a virtual observatory which brings together lots of telescopes from places all over the world using the Internet.