Observatory

The observatory is located at 51.7748°N, 0.0948°W at a rural, relatively unpolluted site near Hertford, 30 km north of the centre of London.

Remote sensing instrumentation currently installed at the Observatory includes a Cimel CE 370-2 micropulse lidar on a scanning mount, daytime and night-time all-sky cameras,  a Cimel CE-318 automatic sun photometer - with data processed and curated by the NASA AERONET network (see video), a similar lunar photometer, a GNSS-based water vapour column measuring system, and two IR radiometers including a Nubiscope scanning radiometer.

Two optical polarimeters are installed. The first polarimeter is an infra-red spectropolarimeter, with a view angle of 60°. The second, an ultra-sensitive sun polarimeter, is a portable version of the PlanetPol polarimeter, capable of measuring fractional polarization down to one part per million. PlanetPol previously detected the alignment of atmospheric dust. A pyranometer and a pyrgeometer for measuring broadband solar radiation are also available.

The Remote Sensing Observatory is co-located with the Astronomy Observatory, operated by the School of Physics Astronomy and Mathematics, which includes several telescopes equipped with CCD cameras and/or spectrographs and instruments for solar observations, such as a coelostat. Some of the research projects carried out at the observatory are described on the Research at Bayfordbury Observatory page.