The observatory's first director was Maurizio Buscalioni, an Italian astronomer who arrived in Caracas with equipment that was modern for the 1880s. Under his leadership, the observatory conducted Venezuela's first systematic measurements of atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, and rainfall. Buscalioni made astrometric observations to determine legal time and the observatory's precise latitude, and he worked to establish relationships with leading observatories across the Americas and Europe. His tenure lasted only three years. He submitted his final report in January 1894, left Venezuela with a severe illness, and died shortly after reaching Italy. The observatory he built outlived him by more than a century.

Dr. Luis Ugueto took charge of the observatory in November 1900 and would not leave until January 1, 1936 — a directorship spanning the entirety of Venezuela's transformation from agricultural backwater to oil state. Despite chronic budget shortfalls, Ugueto installed seismographs, observed Comet Daniel in 1908 and Halley's Comet in 1910, and launched the country's first astronomy classes. His greatest achievement was building a national network of weather stations that improved agricultural planning across Venezuela. But his most persistent struggle was bureaucratic: from the beginning of his tenure, Ugueto requested a meridian circle, the precision instrument essential for accurate timekeeping. Thirty-five years after his first application, the instrument was finally approved and delivered — still within his administration, but barely.

By 1916, the observatory's astronomical instruments were in poor condition, battered by years of tropical weather and inadequate maintenance. When a total solar eclipse presented itself that year, the odds of a successful observation seemed slim. The observatory managed it anyway. The eclipse generated so much enthusiasm that an ad-hoc committee formed with the specific goal of observing it from Tucacas, in Falcón state, where totality would be most dramatic. The commission coordinated with several international expeditions, contributing meaningfully to the global scientific record at a time when Venezuelan science was largely invisible on the world stage. It was the kind of accomplishment that happens when passion outstrips resources — a pattern the observatory would repeat across its entire history.

The observatory's most enduring responsibility is one most Venezuelans encounter without knowing its source. The Cagigal Observatory determines the official legal time of Venezuela, broadcast continuously on shortwave at 5,000 kHz (60-meter band) and by telephone at several numbers. Radio Nacional de Venezuela carries the signal on 630 AM and 91.1 FM. For years the time was also transmitted on 6,100 kHz in the 49-meter band. The instrument behind all of this is a Hewlett-Packard Model HP5061A cesium atomic clock, paired with a frequency amplifier. It produces one pulse per second with an auxiliary power supply for backup. In a country where political and economic stability has sometimes wavered, the observatory has kept counting seconds with atomic precision — a quiet, invisible constancy on its hilltop above the city.

After director Eduardo Rohl's death in 1959, a commission led by the returning Francisco J. Duarte was charged with modernizing Venezuelan astronomy. New instruments were acquired, but the commission recognized what every urban astronomer eventually confronts: the city had grown around the observatory, and its lights were drowning the stars. Some instruments were installed at Cagigal, but most were eventually erected at a dark-sky site in the Venezuelan Andes. The hilltop observatory had given birth to a national scientific tradition, then watched that tradition move to higher, darker ground. Cagigal itself remained, keeping the time, measuring the weather, and housing its seismological museum in a building constructed on the hill in 1956 — a monument to the stubborn persistence of science in a place that rarely made it easy.