[1] Following the suppression of the Jesuits by Clement XIV on 21 July 1773, the palace and the observatory passed to the then rulers of northern Italy, the Austrian Habsburg dynasty.

The astronomers were engaged by Count Giuseppe Di Wilczek, the plenipotentiary governor of Lombardy, to build a meridian line inside Milan Cathedral.

[3] It was constructed by Giovanni Angelo Cesaris and Francesco Reggio, with Roger Joseph Boscovich acting as a consultant.

The research area covers a large range of fields from planets to stars, black holes, galaxies, gamma-ray bursts and cosmology.

The present layout of the gallery is the result of an effort aimed at the preservation and promotion of the items on display, which have been restored and catalogued as part of a project started by the Institute for General and Applied Physics of the University of Milan.