At Arecibo we have a variety of optical instruments that we use to study terrestrial airglow emissions. ... As a complement to the airglow instrumentation we also maintain a set of optical instruments, called lidars, used for "active" remote sensing of the atmosphere. That is, we generate our own source signal using lasers and measure the characteristics of the light scattered back from the atmosphere. ... An operations manual for the Optical Laboratories is currently under major revision. ...