Prompted by the response to his popular lectures, astronomer Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel founded the Cincinnati Astronomical Society in 1842. With its funding, he traveled to Munich, Bavaria, to acquire the optical elements for what became the world's second largest refractor telescope. In 1843 former president John Quincy Adams laid the cornerstone of the observatory building on the hill later known as Mount Adams, and the Cincinnati Observatory was completed and opened for study in 1845. Mitchel, who died in service during the Civil War, was among the first to popularize astronomy in America, and the telescope he brought to Cincinnati remains in daily use as the oldest such instrument in the United States. As the observatory's second director, meteorologist Dr. Cleveland Abbe inaugurated daily weather predictions based on telegraph reports, work that prompted the formation of the U.S. Weather Bureau, forerunner of the National Weather Service. After transfer to the University of Cincinnati, the observatory was relocated to this site in 1873, and five directors guided it through the next one hundred years. Under Dr. Paul Herget, a pioneer in the electronic tracking of satellites, it was designated the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center in 1947. In 1978 the University of Cincinnati's Physics Department assumed operation of the observatory, and in 1999 the University transferred it to The Cincinnati Observatory Center, which preserves the traditions of the oldest professional observatory in the United States.