Performance of the facility instruments on the Hobby-Eberly telescope

Gary J. Hill, Phillip J. MacQueen, Lawrence W. Ramsey

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is a revolutionary large telescope of 9.2 meter aperture, located in West Texas at McDonald Observatory. Early scientific operations started on October 8, 1999. The HET operates with a fixed segmented primary and has a tracker which moves the four-mirror corrector and prime focus instrument package to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of objects. As of two years ago, the HET was taking science data but the image quality and primary mirror stability were far from specifications. We established the HET Completion Project to identify and fix these problems, and here we describe the current performance of the HET relative to its goals, focusing on progress made in the past two years. The first phase of HET instrumentation includes three facility instruments: the Low Resolution Spectrograph (LRS) and High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS), which are in operation, and the Medium Resolution Spectrograph (MRS), which will be commissioned in the summer and autumn. The current status of the instruments is described in detail with performance measures.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)43-54
Number of pages12
JournalProceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
Volume4841
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002
EventInstrument Design and Pefrormance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes - Waikoloa, HI, United States
Duration: Aug 25 2002Aug 28 2002

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
  • Condensed Matter Physics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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