Meudon observatory

The Meudon observatory is attached to the Paris observatory, as is the Nancay radio-astronomy station. The Meudon site is a reference laboratory for studying the Sun, created on the old royal domain in 1875 on the initiative of the astronomer J. Janssen.

The instruments currently on the site are the following:

• a spectroheliograph which analyses and decomposes sunlight;
• a 35-metre tall solar tower (third in the world for the diameter of its lens-580 mm) which sends the sunlight to a spectrograph;
• a 60 centimetre telescope on an equatorial mount;
• a 1 metre diameter telescope;
• an 83 centimetre diameter refracting telescope, the largest in Europe in its time, built at the end of the 19th century by the Henry brothers, under an 18 metre dome. Inside the building supporting the great dome the first coronograph, built by B. Lyot in 1931, can be admired.

The daily solar observations made in Meudon are one ofLesia's (Laboratoire d'études spatiales et d'instrumentation en astrophysique) missions.