The space high vacuum environment also frees the detectors from the ancestral diurnal cycle due to the atmospheric blue light background of the sky, thereby increasing significantly the observation time.
An intermediate variant is the airborne observatory, specialised in the infrared wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, that conduct observations above the part of the atmosphere containing water vapor that absorbs them, in the stratosphere.
Historically, astronomical observatories consisted generally in a building or group of buildings where observations of astronomical objects such as sunspots, planets, asteroids, comets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies in the visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum were conducted.
Modern astrophysics has extended the field of study of celestial bodies to non-electromagnetic vectors, such as neutrinos, neutrons and cosmic rays or gravitational waves.
In order to limit the natural or artificial background noise, most particle detector based observatories are built deep underground.