Since 1916 Steward Observatory has served as the research arm of the University of Arizona's Department of Astronomy. Its offices sit here on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson. Established in 1916, the observatory’s first telescope and building were formally dedicated on April 23, 1923.
From this institutional heart it operates, or partners in, telescopes on five mountain-top locations across Arizona, and at one site in New Mexico, one in Hawaii, and one in Chile. Steward has provided instruments for three different space telescopes and for numerous terrestrial ones, and it hosts one of the few facilities in the world that can cast and figure the very large primary mirrors used in telescopes built in the early 21st century. The observatory owes its existence to Andrew Ellicott Douglass: in 1906 he came to the University of Arizona as Assistant Professor of Physics and Geography, immediately setting up astronomical research with an 8-inch refracting telescope on loan from the Harvard College Observatory and beginning to pursue funding for a large research-class telescope.
Notice the continuity here, from Douglass's first 8-inch telescope on loan from Harvard to the global network and mirror lab Steward now manages.