THE TEIDE OBSERVATORY

• Over thirty years ago at this Observatory, located in Izaña (Tenerife) at an altitude of 2,400 m at the junction between the municipalities of La Orotava, Fasnia and Güímar, Astrophysics commenced in the Canary Islands.

• The Observatory is a key site for solar research, not only because of the transparency and excellent astronomical quality of the sky, but also because the Canary Islands lie in a geographical location between other major eastern and western hemisphere solar observatories and can study the Sun at crucial times when it has set to one hemisphere and has not risen in the other. Thus it has attracted some of the best European solar telescopes and instruments, among them the Franco-Italian THEMIS, the German GCT and VTT as well as several instruments for Solar Seismology.

  

• Apart from solar instruments, the Teide Observatory has other types of telescopes, including the 1.5 m diameter Carlos Sánchez Telescope , a very productive telescope which has been used to train a generation of Spanish infrared astronomers; the IAC80 Telescope , designed and built at the IAC and an educational telescope. There are also some highly specialized radiotelescopes (known as the Tenerife Experiment) devoted to the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation from the "Big Bang" which originated the Universe. These are part of a collaboration between the IAC and Jodrell Bank of Manchester University.