An observatory at an altitude of 2340 m on Mount Hopkins, 56 km south of Tucson, Arizona, owned and operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. It was opened in 1968 as Mount Hopkins Observatory and was renamed in 1982 in honour of F. L. Whipple, a former SAO director. Its main instruments are the 1.5-m Tillinghast reflector, opened in 1970; a 1.2-m reflector, opened in 1990 and fitted with a new mirror in 2013; five 0.2-m refractors of the HATNet Exoplanet Survey, which began operation in 2003; the MEarth-North array of eight 0.4-m reflectors looking for Earthlike planets around M dwarfs, inaugurated in 2008; and the MINERVA array of four 0.7-m reflectors for exoplanet searches, in operation since 2015. The 1.3-m Peters Automated Infrared Imaging Telescope (PAIRITEL), originally used for the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), was closed in 2013. On the summit of Mount Hopkins is the MMT Observatory, jointly operated by the SAO and the University of Arizona. An array of four 12-m gamma-ray telescopes called the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) began operation in 2007.

http://linmax.sao.arizona.edu/help/FLWO/whipple.html Official observatory website.