[1] Herstmonceux suffered from poor weather, and the advent of mass air travel made it plausible for UK astronomers to run an overseas observatory.

[4] Until 2024, the main instruments were the Wide Field Camera (WFC) and Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph (IDS).

WFC is a four CCD photographic prime-focus instrument with a relatively large 0.56×0.56 square degree field of view, which was commissioned in 1997.

[9] A short film was published in 1956 that featured the grinding of the 98-inch mirror blank for the Isaac Newton Telescope by Grubb Parsons.

[11][12] On December 1, 1967, the Isaac Newton Telescope of the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux was inaugurated (dedicated) by Queen Elizabeth II.

[7] The La Palma INT is a Cassegrain telescope, with a 2.54 m (100 in) diameter primary mirror and a focal length of 8.36 m (329 in).

The f/3.29 Prime focus, used with the WFC, allows an unvignetted field of view of 40 arcminutes (approximately 0.3 square degrees).

There is also a secondary focal station, the f/15 Cassegrain focus, which possesses a 20 arcminute field of view and is the mount point for the IDS.

[24] It is being built as part of the Terra Hunting Experiment - a future 10 year radial velocity measurement program to discover Earth-like exoplanets.