The size of the telescope mirror, the largest in Greece,[4] combined with the sensitive detectors that the telescope is equipped with and the good atmospheric conditions of the site, makes it a very valuable tool for observing astronomical objects, of our Galaxy as well as the very faint distant objects located in the outskirts of the Universe.

It is equipped with a 1.2 m Cassegrain reflector telescope manufactured and installed on the site in 1975 by the British company Grubb Parsons Co., Newcastle.

[5][6] The telescope was commissioned by Robert Stirling Newall (1812-1889), a wealthy Scottish engineer and amateur astronomer for his private observatory at Ferndene (Gateshead).

The four existing stations are latitudinally equi-spaced between 30° and 33° corrected geomagnetic latitude and cover the areas of Thessaly, Central Greece and the Peloponnese.

[9] The Athens Digisonde is an infrastructure for remote sensing of the Earth's Ionosphere, operated by NOA in the Penteli Observatory since September 2000.

Data are collected and retrieved in real time (24/7 operation) and are openly available through the main portal of the Ionospheric Group of IAASARS/NOA.

Since February 2009, IAASARS has been operating a ground-based Atmospheric Remote Sensing Station (ARSS) to monitor ground solar radiation levels and particulate pollution over the city of Athens, Greece.

ARSS is equipped with a CIMEL CE318-NEDPS9 solar photometer for the retrieval of the aerosol optical depth at 8 wavelengths from 340 to 1640 nm, including polarization observations.

The instrumentation of IAASARS constitutes a state-of-the-art passive remote sensing suite for atmospheric research, the first one that ever operated in Athens with such specifications.

Since 2007, the Institute has installed and has been using on a 24/7 operational basis a ground station for systematically receiving satellite imagery from the MSG-SEVIRI system maintained by EUMETSAT.

The operating agreement for the collection, archiving, and exploitation for research purposes of MSG images, signed between IAASARS and EUMETSAT, was recently renewed in 2012.

On an operational level, the main application of the MSG/SEVIRI ground station is the detection, monitoring and mapping of forest wildfires[11] in near-real time (every 5 minutes) for the entire Greek territory, the briefing of the public authorities and stakeholders involved in the management and suppression of wildfires, and informing the citizens whose properties are threatened by ongoing catastrophic fire events.