The observatory is situated 1,165 metres (3,822 ft) above sea level in the Warrumbungle National Park on Mount Woorat,[1] also known as Siding Spring Mountain.

After a site survey was undertaken the number of possible locations was narrowed down to two – Siding Spring and Mount Bingar near Griffith, also in New South Wales.

When these negotiations finally came to fruition in 1969, the infrastructure of Siding Spring Observatory was already in place, and it was the obvious site at which to locate the 3.9-metre (13 ft) aperture Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT).

Siding Spring Observatory also houses many telescopes from institutions across the world including, Korea, America, the UK, Poland, Hungary, Germany and Russia.

Currently there are over one thousand registered users of the Faulkes Telescope Project, who vary from schools and community groups to professional astronomers.

The telescope has an optical design that more resembles that of a Schmidt camera, but has a 3-element lens to achieve a wide, corrected field of view.

The APT was developed by extensively modifying the optical, mechanical and electronic systems of a Baker-Nunn satellite tracking instrument.

Uppsala Schmidt Telescope was built in 1957 originally located in Sweden, relocated to Mount Stromlo, then finally in 1982 making a home at Siding Spring Observatory.

The telescope was used by ANU in many roles such as Near Earth Object studies (NEOs) by famous comet hunter Rob McNaught.

The KMTNet system has a very competitive power for wide-field photometric survey sciences that study supernovae, asteroids and external galaxies, for instance.

This fully automated telescope also uses a series of filters enabling the camera to record the spectral type of stars, giving astronomers information about their age, mass and temperature.

Solaris 3, operated by the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences as part of a network across the Southern hemisphere, is a single 0.5-metre telescope, using a new method referred to as eclipse timing to search for exoplanets.

JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, operate four 0.25-metre telescopes, searching and tracking space debris and near-Earth objects in the Southern hemisphere.

Huntsman Telephoto Array is operated by the Australian Astronomical Observatory & Macquarie University to take images of faint galaxy structures using commercial lenses.

bRing-AU, operated by a collaboration of Universities and astronomers will search for circumplanetary material, studying disks of dust in early history and the formation of icy satellites.

The Near-Earth object search program called the Siding Spring Survey (closed 2013) used the Uppsala Southern Schmidt Telescope.