The observatory was born of a friendship between two ambitious men. Domingo F. Sarmiento - educator, writer, and future president of Argentina - met Gould while serving as his country's representative in the United States. Gould was hungry to study the southern hemisphere's stars, which lay beyond the reach of the great northern observatories. Sarmiento was determined to drag his young nation toward science and modernity. Once installed as president, Sarmiento invited Gould south in 1869, promising full support. Gould reached Buenos Aires in 1870 and the Astronomical Observatory of Córdoba was inaugurated on 24 October 1871. At Gould's suggestion, Sarmiento also founded a Meteorological Office in 1872 - the ancestor of today's National Meteorological Service - and built a national network of weather and geomagnetic stations soon after.

Gould did not stop at counting. At Córdoba his team produced what are considered the first stellar photographs in the world - hundreds of glass plates of open star clusters, captured to pin down each star's exact position. From this work came the Catálogo de zonas estelares of 1884, a systematic survey on a scale no one had attempted, recording more than seventy thousand southern stars, followed by a general catalog of some thirty-five thousand more. The southern constellations, long the ragged edge of the celestial map, were finally given form. Gould directed the observatory until 1885, then returned to the United States, leaving behind an institution and a sky newly described.

A generation later, another foreign-born director set himself an even harder task. Charles Dillon Perrine, who took charge in 1909 after years at California's Lick Observatory, proposed building a 61-inch reflecting telescope - equal to the largest in the world at the time. The government approved it in 1912. The mount and dome came from Cleveland, the great glass disc from a French maker, but the war, the death of a key technician, economic limits, and the sheer difficulty of grinding the mirror dragged the project across decades. Perrine retired in 1936 with the telescope still incomplete. It finally took the work of Argentina's first astrophysicist, Enrique Gaviola, who took control of shaping the mirror after an American firm could not finish it.

On 5 July 1942 - thirty-three years after Perrine first imagined it - the Bosque Alegre Astrophysical Station was inaugurated in the Sierras Chicas, about thirty miles southwest of Córdoba at 1,200 meters. Gaviola, speaking at the opening, called it the work of Perrine's optimistic and courageous mind, a daring dream pursued through triumphs and defeats. The great reflector remained the largest telescope in South America until 1981. Beside it now stands the Perrine telescope, the first large reflector designed and built entirely in Argentina, finished as practice for the bigger mirror and relocated to Bosque Alegre in 2011. It went back to work immediately, still helping to confirm discoveries of new bodies across the sky - a working monument to a century of looking up from Córdoba.