Mount Stromlo Observatory located in the west of Canberra, Australia, is part of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU).

The Mount Stromlo site had already been used for observations in the previous decade, a small observatory being established there by Pietro Baracchi using the Oddie telescope located there in 1911.

[1] The dome built to house the Oddie telescope was the first Commonwealth building constructed in the newly established Australian Capital Territory.

Dr R. Wooley Director of the Observatory, worked to gain support for a larger reflector, arguing that the southern hemisphere should attempt to compete with the effectiveness of American telescopes.

[6] On 18 January 2003, the devastating Canberra firestorm hit Mount Stromlo (which was surrounded by a plantation pine forest), destroying five telescopes, workshops, seven homes, and the heritage-listed administration building.

[13] This discovery was made by repeated imaging of the Magellanic Clouds with the refurbished 50-inch Great Melbourne Telescope which was equipped with a mosaic of eight 2048 by 2048 pixel CCDs.

In total, the MACHO project made over 200 billion stellar measurements, with the data processed both at the observatory and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

[15] In 2011, Brian P. Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for such observations which provided evidence for the accelerating Universe.

[18] This includes the near infrared integral field spectrometer, NIFS, deployed on Gemini-North, and the adaptive optics imager for Gemini-South, GSAOI.