Jantar Mantar
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How it came to be
Jai Singh II, the Rajput king who founded Jaipur in north-western India, noticed that the Zij tables of celestial positions did not match what he observed, and built observatories in several cities to make better ones. In Jaipur several instruments were up by 1728, and building went on until 1738.
Its 20 or so large masonry instruments measure celestial positions with the naked eye, among them the world's largest stone sundial, and they work in the horizon, equatorial and ecliptic coordinate systems. The tables compiled from such observations were used in India for a century.
The observatory was abandoned for a time in the 19th century and damaged, then restored. It was inscribed in 2010 as the most significant and best-preserved historic observatory in India, a record of the astronomy of a scholarly prince's court at the end of the Mughal period.
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