Tower of the Winds

I’m looking straight through the Radcliffe Observatory’s octagonal Tower of the Winds at this morning's surprising cloudless Mediterranean sky. (It was so intensely bright that I had to get up and out first thing despite the cold.)

The building was an observatory from 1773 (though completed only in 1794) until it was sold in 1934 to fund a new observatory in less-polluted Pretoria, South Africa. It's now the dining room and common room of Green Templeton College but you can still see an old telescope and the spiral staircase that students aren't supposed to climb to the roof.