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The observatory
Sawai Jai Singh built 19 instruments to watch the sky
The Jantar Mantar is a collection of 19 astronomical instruments built by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur. It was completed in 1734 and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
19astronomical instruments, read with the naked eye
The name
Jantar Mantar means a calculating instrument
The name jantar comes from yantra, a Sanskrit word meaning instrument or machine, and mantar from mantrana, meaning consult or calculate. Jantar Mantar literally means calculating instrument.
The tables
Jai Singh made new tables because the old ones did not match
Jai Singh noticed that the Zij, used to find the position of celestial objects, did not match the positions calculated on the table. He built five new observatories. His tables, the Zij-i Muhammad Shahi, were used in India for a century.
The sundial
The Vrihat Samrat Yantra is 88 feet high and tells time to two seconds
The Vrihat Samrat Yantra, the great king of instruments, is 88 feet high, one of the world's largest sundials. Its face is angled at 27 degrees, the latitude of Jaipur, and its shadow moves visibly at 1 mm per second.
88 feetheight of the Vrihat Samrat Yantra sundial
Neglect
The observatory was a gun factory under Pratap Singh
Pratap Singh turned the site of the observatory into a gun factory, and a temple was built there. Ram Singh completed restoring the Jantar Mantar in 1876, and it was not restored again until 1901.
Day 1, afternoon
It comes after City Palace, Jaipur. Then Johari Bazaar.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.