Originally funded jointly by the United Kingdom and Australian governments, it was managed wholly by Australia's Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.

[3] In the years immediately after World War II optical observational astronomy in the UK was toiling due to a lack of modern infrastructure.

In the 1950s Richard Woolley, Director of Mount Stromlo Observatory from 1939 to 1956 and Astronomer Royal from 1956 to 1971, suggested constructing a large telescope in Australia.

After a series of meetings between British and Australian scientists in the early 1960s to discuss the technical specifications and begin the search for a suitable site for the proposed telescope, a formal approach was made to the governments of both countries in July 1965.

The telescope was to be located on Siding Spring Mountain in the Warrumbungles, which was owned by the Australian National University (ANU) and the site of some of their existing infrastructure.

The matter was not settled until June 1973 when the Australian government endorsed the AATBs decision for an independent staff, marking the birth of the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

In late-1967 the contract for the primary mirror blank was awarded to Owens-Illinois, USA and the 27.5 ton structure was cast from zero-expansion Cervit glass in April 1969.

[6] Instruments such as AAOmega, and its predecessor 2dF, use optical fibres to feed the light of stars and galaxies from the telescope into a spectrograph where it is dispersed into its component colours for detailed subsequent analysis.

[9] The primary goal of this study is to use an intrinsic feature in the distribution of galaxies as a "standard ruler" to relate distance to redshift and improve our knowledge of the nature of dark energy.

The AAOmega data will be used in conjunction with observations from satellite observatories such as the Herschel Space Observatory, and other telescopes around the world, to examine the predictions of the Cold Dark Matter standard cosmological model, like the relationship between the number density of dark matter halos and their masses and the relationship between the number density of galaxies and their masses as determined through studying their starlight.

The AAPS exploits the high stability of the University College London Echelle Spectrograph (UCLES) to obtain the few metres per second precision in measurements of the line-of-sight velocities of stars necessary to detect the reflex Doppler motion induced by the presence of a planet.