Mona's Lab [defunct] has a brief story about a new Chinese observatory, and I thought, cool, I wonder if I can find it on Google Maps. So I started looking around for a clue. Found several entries pointing the world's largest fully robotic
astronomical observatory, so I started looking on Google Maps. No much luck. All the references point to locations in cities, although the pictures and descriptions show it to be in the mountains, well outside of a city. More searching reveals that Yunnan province is 2,000 meters above sea level, and a
list of mountains in Yunnan province. Plotted the mountains on Google Maps. Found a golf course, but not the observatory. Looking at the overall map, I realize this area is just North of Burma, which means that the
Burma Road came through here. The Burma Road terminated at Kunming, one of the cities listed as a location of the Chinese observatory. Seems the Chinese don't really want anyone to know just exactly where their observatories are.
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Update September 2016 replaced missing picture, removed dead links.
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