The OPTICON Alliance is an alliance of small-to-medium-aperture telescopes led from IA-FORTH in Heraklion, with historical roots in OPTICON, the Optical Infrared Coordination Network for Astronomy, which was coordinated from Cambridge, UK from 2000 with EC funding support. 

One of the early activities established the first forum for the Directors of all of Europe's optical-infrared telescopes which provided open-access Trans-National Access to their facilities. This Telescope Directors' Forum - TDF - flourished and proved highly valued. 

From 2010 a network of smaller telescopes was developed within OPTICON, which were able to contribute to Time Domain Astronomy, facilitated by central data processing and archiving, simple no-proposal user access, and central target provision. The science focus initially was for follow-up support to Gaia-Alerts transient discoveries, and supported this science through the decade of successful operation of the Gaia Alerts programme, until that ended with the end-of-life of the Gaia satellite operation in March 2025. This activity has grown into the 100+ telescopes which contribute through the BHTOM activity to a very wide range of Time Domain Astronomy. 

The combination of the facilities in the TDF and those in BHTOM together form the OPTICON Alliance. Membership is being expanded more widely.

An interesting history of the many activities - strategy, technology development, funding access, community building... which the OPTICON project delivered in its 25-year history has been written by Dr John Davies, the OPTICON Project Manager through almost all its history. 

This history will be added to this site shortly.