The building is located on the Valais side of the border, only a few metres from the canton of Bern, although it is accessed via the Jungfrau Railway from the Bernese Oberland.

The observatory plays an important role in a range of long-term experiments; it serves as a solar spectrometer for the Institute of Astrophysics and Geophysics at the University of Liège, Belgium, and plays a key role in a LIDAR experiment conducted by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

In 1949, nuclear emulsion plates exposed to cosmic rays in the observatory provided first precise evidence for the existence of the charged K-meson.

The observatory can be seen in the movies The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Hero: Love Story of a Spy and Krrish 3.

[3] It also appears in the 2016 videogame Steep[4] and as the setting for a conference called The Meadows in the final episode of The Pentaverate.