Performance of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and facility instruments

Gary J. Hill; Phillip J. MacQueen; Lawrence W. Ramsey; Matthew D. Shetrone

doi:10.1117/12.552439

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30 September 2004 Performance of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and facility instruments

Gary J. Hill, Phillip J. MacQueen, Lawrence W. Ramsey, Matthew D. Shetrone

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Proceedings Volume 5492, Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.552439
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2004, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Abstract

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is a revolutionary large telescope of 9.2 meter aperture, located in West Texas at McDonald Observatory. 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. The HET has been taking science data for five years, but the image quality and primary mirror stability have been far from specifications. Work over the past two years has improved performance significantly, and demonstrated site-seeing limited images of 0.8 arcsec., showing that the telescope will meet all specifications. The performance of the HET is discussed in detail. The first phase of HET instrumentation includes three facility instruments: the Low Resolution Spectrograph (LRS), the Medium Resolution Spectrograph (MRS), and High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS). The current status of the instruments is described. Upcoming near infrared capabilities for the LRS and MRS are also discussed.

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Gary J. Hill, Phillip J. MacQueen, Lawrence W. Ramsey, and Matthew D. Shetrone "Performance of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and facility instruments", Proc. SPIE 5492, Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy, (30 September 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.552439

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