Department members also use large single-dish radio telescopes including the 300-m dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico; the 100-m Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia; and telescopes at Parkes, Australia, and Jodrell Bank, U.K.

Several Liquid Mirror Telescopes (employing rotating mercury) have been designed or built by members of the Department. The latest is the 6-metre Large Zenith Telescope that recently began operation. Located near Vancouver, this telescope will conduct deep multi-band drift-scan surveys for galaxies, quasars, and to distant supernovae.

Several members of the faculty are part of teams obtaining and analysing data from space facilities including HST, the Hubble Space Telescope in the visible & near infrared; FUSE (the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer) in the ultraviolet; In the microwave region, we are involved with a number of projects including WMAP (The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) Plank and Herschel The latter two projects share a ESA platform in Solar orbit at the L5 point. The principal investigator and a ground station for the space telesocpe MOST which studies stellar seismology and hunts for extrasolar planets

Members of the Department are also heavily involved in plans for future astronomical projects including the Next Generation Space Telescope anf the Thirty Metre Telescope.

The department is also involved in the design, construction and operation of a number of ground- and balloon-based submillimetre and millimetre telescopes designed for studying cosmology. This includes BLAST, ACT and and Spider