Palermo Astronomical Observatory

He named this object which became classified in the 21st century a dwarf planet, Cerere Ferdinandea, in honour of the myth of Ceres set in Sicily and of King Ferdinand; thanks to this discovery, he was awarded a gold medal which he refused instead donating its worth to the purchase of other instruments, including a Troughton equatorial telescope that he placed in the second dome of the observatory.

The management of the Palermo observatory was then entrusted to Domenico Ragona, who succeeded in obtaining from the Two Sicilies government the necessary funds to purchase new instruments, including a 25 cm aperture Merz equatorial telescope, delivered in 1859.

With the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860, the situation was reversed: Gaetano Cacciatore's directorship was reinstated and Ragona removed, without being able to install the Merz telescope.

[1] They were years characterized by great difficulties of the institution, which had already seen, in the reform of 1923, declassification to a simple astronomical cabinet, and it was hit by a serious decline, with a reduction of personnel and scarcity of funds for the conduct of observations and for technological adaptation.

The observatory has a laboratory for the development and testing of scientific instrumentation for x-ray band telescopes (X-ray Astronomy Calibration and Testing Facility, XACT) in a separate building, a high-tech computing center, carries out iterations and error-testing of numerical models collating observations and measurements in astrophysics (System of Calculation for Numerical Astrophysics, SCAN) and the Museum of the Specola, which contains a vast collection of astronomical instruments belonging to the Observatory.