Southern Hemisphere Observatories From Mount Stromlo in 1924 to the Rubin Observatory

The Australian National University observatory west of Canberra was founded in 1924 and long led optical astronomy in Australia. Bushfires in 2003 destroyed most of its historic telescopes and buildings, and it continues today as a centre for instrument development and research.

Harvard moved its Southern Hemisphere station here from Peru in 1927 to find clearer skies for photographic survey work. It stands at Maselspoort, about 20 kilometres north-east of Bloemfontein, and is now a research and science education centre.

This radio site just south of the Magaliesberg mountains was built by NASA in 1961 as a satellite tracking station. It later became South Africa's national radio astronomy facility, and its 26-meter dish anchored very long baseline interferometry in Africa.

The first site of the European Southern Observatory opened in 1964 on the outskirts of the Atacama Desert, 150 km northeast of La Serena. Its 3.58-metre NTT uses active optics, and the HARPS spectrograph here is a leading planet-hunting instrument.

Construction began in 1963 and regular observations started in 1965 on a summit in the Coquimbo Region of northern Chile. Its Blanco Telescope carried the Dark Energy Camera used for the Dark Energy Survey of the southern sky.

Sited on a mountain near Coonabarabran in New South Wales, this observatory has served Australian optical astronomy since the 1960s. More than 60 telescopes have stood on the site, led by the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope.

Established in 1972, the national centre for optical and infrared astronomy in South Africa traces its lineage to the Royal Observatory founded at Cape Town in 1820. Its headquarters are in Cape Town and its major telescopes are at Sutherland in the Northern Cape.

This equatorially mounted 3.9-metre telescope at Siding Spring, a joint United Kingdom and Australian project, had first light on 27 April 1974. It was long the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and carried out the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.

Opened on 2 September 1988 at the Paul Wild Observatory, 25 kilometres west of Narrabri, this array of six 22-meter dishes can be moved along a rail track to change its resolution. It makes radio images of celestial objects.

Twin 8.1-metre telescopes split between Mauna Kea in Hawaii and Cerro Pachon in the Chilean Andes give the observatory both hemispheres of sky. Gemini South stands at over 2,700 metres, and the North telescope began scientific operations in 2000.

Officially opened by President Thabo Mbeki on 10 November 2005 near Sutherland in the Karoo, it has a 9.2-metre effective aperture and is designed mainly for spectroscopy. It is the largest single optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.

On Cerro Pachon in Chile, the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope is built to survey the southern sky every few nights. Its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time lists probing dark energy and dark matter among its core science aims.