code: 053) is an astronomical observatory located in Budapest, Hungary is part of the Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences (Hungarian: Csillagászati és Földtudományi Kutatóközpont) and belongs to the HUN-REN Magyar Kutatási Hálózat.

The main research areas include stellar structure and evolution, stellar and solar activity, variable stars, star and planetary formation, interstellar material, exoplanets, cosmology, large sky survey, Solar System studies, nuclear and extragalactic astrophysics, high energy astrophysics including supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and other transient events, radio astronomy, galactic archeology, designing and manufacturing astronomical instrumentation and cubesats, as well as history of astronomy.

In 1899, the Hurbanovo site was renamed to Royal Konkoly-founded Astrophysical Observatory, and operated under the direction of Konkoly-Thege and Radó Kövesligethy, a renowned geophysicist of the time.

The main scientific profile of the institute was the photometry of stars, the observation of the Sun, meteor counting, and providing time service for the government.

The new building, known as the Svábhegy observatory after a nearby hill, was finished by 1924, and the 6" refractor and the re-ordered 60 cm Heyde telescope were set up in new domes by 1928.

After the communist takeover of Hungary in 1948, a new network of research institutes, independent from universities, was set up under the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS).

With the communist isolation of the country, international relations shifted from predominantly German and American to Soviet and Eastern-bloc partnerships.

During one of his visits to the Western bloc, Detre received an RCA 1P21 photomultiplier tube from American astronomer Harlow Shapley to start photometric measurements at the observatory in 1948.

In 1957, after the launch of Sputnik, multiple independent satellite observing and tracking stations were set up in the country at the suggestion of the Soviet Union.

Relations with the West soon eased and at the 1961 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union at Berkeley, the institute was tasked with setting up and circulating the Information Bulletin on Variable Stars.

The institute expanded in the 1960-70s with the foundation and subsequent independence of the Debrecen Heliophysical Observatory and the installation of new telescopes at Piszkéstető Mountain Station.

Given that space-based imagery has superseded the ground-based observations as the input source of the databases, the two photoheliographs were also decommissioned and removed from their mounts at Debrecen and Gyula.

After settling for Piszkéstető peak in the Mátra mountains, about 80 km away from the capital, a residence building was constructed in 1960, and the new Schmidt telescope was installed in 1962.

The telescope provided a 10°x10° field of view with photographic plates and could be equipped with an objective prism for low-resolution mass spectroscopic observations.

This marked the end of the initial development of Piszkéstető station.In the late 1990s, photographic plates and photometers were replaced with CCD cameras on the Schmidt and RCC telescopes.

[6] Piszkéstető also hosts other instrumentations, including a seismic and gravimetric station of the Institute for Geophysics and Geodesy, and an infrasound detector array.