In October 1993 the Department of Physics and Astronomy came into being as the result of a merger between the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy. The astronomers continue to occupy the Blackford Hill site (near the King's Buildings campus) in close scientific cooperation with the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, and this grouping within the Department is known as the Edinburgh Institute for Astronomy. The rest of the Department is housed in the James Clerk Maxwell Building (which also contains the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the Departments of Computer Science, of Mathematics and Statistics, and of Meteorology) on the King's Buildings campus.