Performance of the facility instruments on the Hobby-Eberly telescope

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

doi:10.1117/12.461901

7 March 2003 Performance of the facility instruments on the Hobby-Eberly telescope

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

Proceedings Volume 4841, Instrument Design and Performance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.461901
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2002, Waikoloa, Hawai'i, United States

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.

Citation Download Citation

Gary J. Hill, Phillip J. MacQueen, and Lawrence W. Ramsey "Performance of the facility instruments on the Hobby-Eberly telescope", Proc. SPIE 4841, Instrument Design and Performance for Optical/Infrared Ground-based Telescopes, (7 March 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.461901

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