Gardens of the Observatory of Paris

The Paris Observatory grounds feature a tall, slender meridian line carved directly into the pavement of the central alley. King Louis the Fourteenth commissioned this building in sixteen sixty-seven to map the stars and standardize time for France. Inside the main structure, astronomers once calculated the exact position of the sun as it crossed the meridian at noon. Cassini the first lived and worked here, tracking the moons of Jupiter while the royal court looked to his charts for navigation and colonial expansion.