University Of Glasgow Observatory

Out on Acre Road in Maryhill (close to the Garscube estate) the University of Glasgow has its very own observatory*. It was refubished this summer (2015), a pretty big job that involved turning a corridor of offices into a teaching and seminar space. Now the refubishment is finished, it’s looking pretty great.
As well as the teaching and research labs, the observatory has a workshop, the main dome (housing a 16 inch Meade telescope), the solar dome (which has a 12 inch Meade), a transit house with the transit telescope, a 3 meter HI radio telescope, a 408 MHz pulsar telescope and a solar CALLISTO spectrometer. There’s a few other smaller telescopes knocking around as well, plus photography equipment, and there’s a small planetarium beneath the solar dome.
If all of that’s Greek to you, don’t worry! If you’re an astronomy student at the university you’ll hear all about it eventually anyway. If you’re not you probably don’t really need to know. However, if you’re curious, observatory visits and tours can sometimes be booked through the main observatory website. Since the refurbishment, the observatory director is particularly keen to get more use out of the site, so I’d expect to see more of these on offer soon The only problem, of course, is it can sometimes be very hard to see very much through the Scottish weather.
*There are actually two observatories associated with the unviersity. The second, known as «Concho» houses a 20 inch Grubb Parsons telescope and is located even further away from the city, in the Kilpatrick Hills, where more light polution can be avoided.