A research centre of the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1890 at Washington, DC, but which moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1955. The SAO hosts the International Astronomical Union’s Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams and Minor Planet Center. In 1973 the SAO and the neighbouring Harvard College Observatory (HCO) established the joint Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. SAO owns and operates the Fred Lawrence Whipple observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona, and jointly owns and operates the MMT Observatory, also on Mount Hopkins. The SAO, in conjunction with the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, jointly owns and operates the Submillimeter Array (SMA) of eight 6-m dishes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, opened in 2003.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/sao/ Official observatory website.