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 language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 43-54 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering |
Volume | 4841 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2002 |
Event | Instrument Design and Pefrormance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes - Waikoloa, HI, United States Duration: Aug 25 2002 → Aug 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