Mt Stromlo observatory is located a short bike ride from the house I grew up in.
My friends and I would often ride to the top and then eat a packed lunch of Devon and tomato sauce sandwiches, or a steaming dollars worth of hot chips with buckets of salt and lashings of vinegar, or bars of chocolate to be washed down with chocolate milk….. Once satiated we would spend happy hours looking around all the observatories, peering in as many windows as legally accessible, before racing back down the winding road (attempting, always unsuccessfully, to jump the cattle grid half way down).

Sadly, many of the original buildings from the early 1920’s were destroyed by the Canberra Firestorm of 2003 (you can read my account of this fire here).

Since then new telescopes and equipment have been installed, including a rapid survey telescope, called the ‘Sky Mapper’ and the Quantum Optical Ground Station. A SciFi bit of kit that allows earth to space communication at a blistering rate of one terabit-per-second.
Killer for streaming Netflix when on the moon.