Saint Petersburg Magnetic Observatory

About 100 km north of Saint Petersburg, Russia, the Saint Petersburg Magnetic Observatory continuously records the Earth's magnetic field from a site with observation roots going back to the 19th century.

About Saint Petersburg Magnetic Observatory

The observatory was founded in the late 1960s as a geomagnetic branch of the Voeikovo observatory, based at the former Krasnoye Ozero (Red Lake) site where observations were also taken from 1960 to 1990. Its magnetic observation series traces back to one of the oldest in the region, originating in 1834 and resumed in the modern era. It is operated by the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

History

The station was upgraded to INTERMAGNET standard in 2012, officially certified as an INTERMAGNET observatory on June 9, 2016, and fitted with modern magnetometric instrumentation in 2014, producing its first fully definitive dataset in 2015.

Location & getting there

The site lies roughly 100 km north of central Saint Petersburg, away from the electrical interference of the city, which is important for precise magnetic field measurements.

Visiting Saint Petersburg Magnetic Observatory

As a scientific monitoring station, it is not set up as a public visitor attraction; its data is published via INTERMAGNET and the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

See your named star from here

While this station reads Earth's magnetism rather than starlight, the clear skies north of Saint Petersburg are still a fine place to look for the coordinates of a named star. See more named stars in our catalogue.