It is located at Kavalur in the Javadi Hills, near Vaniyambadi in Tirupathur district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Vainu Bappu who took over as the director of the Kodaikanal Observatory in 1960, found a sleepy little hamlet called Kavalur in the Javadi Hills as a suitable site for establishing optical telescopes for observing celestial objects.

The Kavalur Observatory is located in a 40-hectare forest land in Tamil Nadu which is strewn with a variety of greenery of tropical region besides a number of medicinal plants with an occasional appearance of some wildlife like deer, snakes and scorpions.

Apart from being reasonably away from city lights and industrial areas, the location has been chosen in order to be closer to the earth's equator for covering both northern and southern hemispheres with equal ease.

In addition, its longitudinal position is such that it is the only major astronomical facility between Australia and South Africa for observing the southern objects.

The equatorially mounted horse-shoe-yoke structure of the telescope is ideally suited for low latitudes and permits easy observation near the north celestial pole.

In 1972, atmosphere was detected around Jupiter's satellite Ganymede[4] and in the year 1977, participated in the observations that confirmed rings were discovered around the planet Uranus.

[9] Front-line research is being carried out with the help of the optical telescopes at Vainu Bappu Observatory using several focal plane instrumentational facilities.

The telescopes at the observatory had started with relatively modest focal plane instruments and later on graduated to more sophisticated ones.

A programme of ultraflow dispersion spectroscopy was successfully used to survey stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).