Teide Observatory

The QUIJOTE CMB Experiment is an ongoing experiment started in November 2012, and led by Rafael Rebolo López, with the goal of characterizing the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and other galactic and extragalactic emission in the frequency range 10 to 40 GHz, at angular scales of 1°. These measurements will complement at low frequency and correct from galactic contamination those obtained by the Planck satellite from 2009 to 2013.The two QUIJOTE telescopes are placed at the Teide Observatory, run by the Spanish Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC). Both telescopes were produced by the IDOM company in Spain.

GroundBIRD is an experiment to observe the cosmic microwave background at 145 and 220GHz. It aims to observe the B-mode polarisation signal from inflation in the early universe. It is located at Teide Observatory, on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

The Very Small Array (VSA) was a 14-element interferometric radio telescope operating between 26 and 36 GHz that is used to study the cosmic microwave background radiation. It was a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, University of Manchester and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (Tenerife), and was located at the Observatorio del Teide on Tenerife. The array was built at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory by the Cavendish Astrophysics Group and Jodrell Bank Observatory, and was funded by PPARC (now STFC). The design was strongly based on the Cosmic Anisotropy Telescope.The telescope was comparable in terms of capabilities to several other CMB experiments, including the balloon-based BOOMERanG and MAXIMA, and the ground-based DASI and CBI.

The Tenerife Experiment was a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiment built by Jodrell Bank (then known as the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories) of the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC). It was the first CMB experiment to be installed and run at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife, starting operations in October 1984, and running with various upgrades and additional experiments until 2000.It measured anisotropy of the CMB on angular sizes of 5 degrees, about the size of the upper half of the constellation of Orion (from the "belt" to the "shoulders"). To reduce receiver instability, it performed fast Dicke Switching between two horns separated by 8 degrees. To remove long term drifts and atmospheric variations, it used a further switch of 8 degrees using a flat mirror in front of the horns.

COSMOSOMAS is a circular scanning astronomical microwave experiment to investigate the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy and diffuse emission from the Galaxy on angular scales from 1 to 5 degrees. It was designed and built by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife, Spain, in 1998. Its name comes from "COSMOlogical Structures On Medium Angular Scales" referring to CMB fluctuations. This experiment grew out experience of the previous Tenerife Experiment with the need to go to smaller angular scales with greater sensitivity. The experiment consists of two instruments, COSMO15 (three channels at 12.7, 14.7 and 16.3 GHz) and COSMO11 (two hands of linear polarization at 10.9 GHz). Both instruments are based on a circular scanning sky strategy, consisting of a 60 rpm spinning flat mirror directing the sky radiation into an off-axis paraboloidal antenna, whose size is 1.8-m in the COSMO15 and 2.4-m in the COSMO11. These antennas focus the radiation on to cryogenically cooled HEMT-based receivers, both at an operating temperature of 20K (-253 C) and in the frequency range of 10–12 GHz for COSMO11, and 12–18 GHz for COSMO15. In the COSMO15 instrument, the signal is split by a set of three filters, allowing simultaneous observations at 13, 15 and 17 GHz. Thus, four 1-degree resolution sky maps complete in right ascension and covering 20 degrees in declination are obtained every day at these frequencies. The most important result to come from this experiment is the cleanest detection of "spinning dust" in the Perseus molecular cloud. These are very small dust grains which can spin thousands of million times a second. If they have an asymmetrical electrical charge they can radiate like a lot of tiny dipole antennas. This cloud is very bright at infra-red wavelengths due to thermal emission from the large dust grains, but very little emission would be expected at microwave wavelengths by this type of dust. Instead there is a broad bump of signal centered on 22 GHz, a factor of 50 above the expected level of signal.

The Telescopio Carlos Sánchez is a 1.52 m Dall-Kirkham type infrared telescope with an equatorial mount and an f/13.8 Cassegrain focus. It is located at Observatorio del Teide on Tenerife, and is operated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. It was built in 1971 by the United Kingdom and has been used for a wide range of infrared observational programmes, from large-scale Galactic Centre mapping to stellar oscillations. The telescope was built by the United Kingdom but was transferred to the Spanish in 1983.The name of the telescope was adopted in honour of Prof. Carlos Sánchez Magro, Astrophysics Professor at the University of La Laguna. Since 2018 this telescope has operated the MuSCAT2 instrument, a four color camera. The first light MuSCAT2 was in August 2017, and science operations started in January 2019.The camera is specially designed to engage in simultaneous capture of an image in four colour bands, " g (400 to 550 nm), r (550 to 700 nm), i (700 to 820 nm), and zs (820 to 920 nm)."This telescope was originally called the Infrared Flux Collector (IRFC) when it was completed in 1972.

The Bradford Robotic Telescope (BRT) is an autonomous astronomical telescope located at Teide Observatory, Tenerife in the Canary Islands. It is owned by the University of Bradford and was built between 2002 and 2004 for remote use by schools and individuals worldwide. As of November 2009, the observatory has returned over 70,000 images and has more than 23,000 users.On May 15, 2016, the BRT team announced via email to registered users that control of the Bradford Telescope would be transferred to the Open University, and renamed the Autonomous Robotic Telescope (ART). The transfer of the telescope assets to the Open University was completed in 2016. The original telescope hardware is in the process of being decommissioned (May 2017) and has been replaced by two telescopes on Mount Teide, the Physics Innovations Robotic Telescope Explorer (PIRATE) and the COmpletely Autonomous Service Telescope (COAST) installed as part of the OpenSTEM Labs facility.

GREGOR is a solar telescope, equipped with a 1.5 m primary mirror, located at 2,390 m altitude at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. It replaces the older Gregory Coudé Telescope and was inaugurated on May 21, 2012. First light, using a 1 metre test mirror, was on March 12, 2009 (2009-03-12).GREGOR is the third-largest solar telescope in the world, after the Big Bear Observatory and the McMath-Pierce solar telescope. It is aimed at observing the solar photosphere and chromosphere at visible and infrared wavelengths. GREGOR sports a high-order adaptive optics (AO) system with a 256-actuator deformable mirrors and a 156-subaperture Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. Efforts are underway to implement multi-conjugate AO in 2014.

The ESA Optical Ground Station (OGS Telescope or ESA Space Debris Telescope) is the European Space Agency's ground based observatory at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife, Spain, built for the observation of space debris. OGS is part of the Artemis experiment and is operated by the IAC (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) and Ataman Science S.L.U. The observatory is a 1-meter Coudé telescope with a field of view of 0.7 degrees, supported by an English cross-axial mount inside a dome 12.5-meters in diameter. Its main purposes are: to be the optical ground station of the Artemis telecommunications satellite (the project from which the telescope takes its name) to survey space debris in different orbits around the Earth, to conduct surveys and follow-up observations of near-Earth objects as part of ESA's Space Situational Awareness programme, and to make scientific astronomical night observations.It is equipped with a cryogenically cooled mosaic CCD-Camera of 4k×4k pixels. The detection threshold is between 19th and 21st magnitude, which corresponds to a capability to detect space debris objects as small as 10 cm in the geostationary ring. As a large part of the observation time is dedicated to space debris surveys, in particular the observation of space debris in the geostationary ring and in geostationary transfer orbits, the term ESA Space Debris Telescope became used very frequently. Space debris surveys are carried out every month, centered on New Moon.Since 2006, the telescope has also been used as a receiver station for quantum communication experiments (such as testing Bell's inequality, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation), with the sender station being 143 km away in the observatory on La Palma. This is possible because this telescope can be tilted to a near-horizontal position to point it at La Palma, which many large astronomical telescopes are unable to do.

The Vacuum Tower Telescope is an evacuated-optics solar telescope located at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. It is operated by the Kiepenheuer-Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS).It was built between 1983 and 1986, with first light in 1988. It has a 70-centimetre (28-inch) diameter primary mirror and a focal length of 46 metres (151 ft). Thanks to an adaptive optics system KAOS (Kiepenheuer-institute Adaptive Optic System), in operation since spring 2000, it is able to resolve details down to 0.2 arc seconds (150 km) on the Sun's surface.