The observatory has a visitors' centre and a residencia (hostel) for astronomers. Brian May helped construct a building there to study interplanetary dust.
The Minor Planet Center credits the discovery of several minor planets directly to the observatory.5
In 1995, Rafael Rebolo López, María Rosa Zapatero-Osorio and Eduardo L. Martín published their discovery of Teide-1, which they found through optical observations using the 0.8 meter telescope at Teide Observatory.6
The position where the observatory is situated has a mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb), with average temperature features reminiscent of southern England. This renders in warm summers that averages around 23 °C (73 °F) with light frosts being possible and sometimes happening in winter. Extremes are moderated by its marine features, which combined with the altitude keeps temperatures below 30 °C (86 °F) even during heat waves, and in spite of the altitude the marine features are strong enough to prevent severe frosts. Sunshine levels, as typical of the nearby lowland arid climates, are high throughout the year. Many alpine areas at further distance from the equator are above the tree line at this elevation, but Teide is far above even any subarctic temperatures due to its position on the 28th parallel north.
The useful observing time is given as 78% and the median FWHM seeing from DIMM measurements is given as 0.76" and 0.70" at two sites near the Carlos Sánchez Telescope.10
THEMIS Website http://www.themis.iac.es/ ↩
THEMIS Instrument Paper https://doi.org/10.1016/0083-6656(85)90077-7 ↩
GREGOR Website at KIS, Freiburg http://www.kis.uni-freiburg.de/index.php?id=163&L=1 ↩
David Airey (1993). "Construction of a small spectrograph for stellar spectroscopy and its use on some brighter stars". Journal of the British Astronomical Association. 103: 11–18. Bibcode:1993JBAA..103...11A. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1993JBAA..103...11A ↩
"Minor Planet Discoverers (by number)". Minor Planet Center. 4 September 2016. Retrieved 27 November 2016. http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/MPDiscsNum.html ↩
"25th anniversary of the discovery of the first brown dwarf". https://www.iac.es/en/outreach/news/25th-anniversary-discovery-first-brown-dwarf ↩
"Izana Climate Normals 1991-2020". NOAA. Archived from the original on 2024-03-22. https://web.archive.org/web/20240322054033/https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/archive/arc0216/0253808/2.2/data/0-data/Region-6-WMO-Normals-9120/Spain/CSV/IZANA_60010.csv ↩
"Valores climatológicos normales. Izaña" (in Spanish). Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. Archived from the original on 2024-04-04. https://web.archive.org/web/20240404090912/https://www.aemet.es/es/serviciosclimaticos/datosclimatologicos/valoresclimatologicos?l=C430E&k=coo ↩
"Valores extremos. Izaña" (in Spanish). Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. Archived from the original on 2024-03-22. https://web.archive.org/web/20240322053914/https://www.aemet.es/es/serviciosclimaticos/datosclimatologicos/efemerides_extremos?w=0&k=coo&datos=det&l=C430E ↩
Vernin, J.; et al. (2002). "Site-testing Results at the Teide Observatory" (PDF). ASPC. 266: 454. Bibcode:2002ASPC..266..454V. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?2002ASPC..266..454V&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf ↩