The wide field upgrade for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

John A. Booth; Phillip J. MacQueen; John M. Good; Gordon L. Wesley; Gary J. Hill; Povilas Palunas; Pedro R. Segura; Robert E. Calder

doi:10.1117/12.672694

23 June 2006 The wide field upgrade for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

John A. Booth, Phillip J. MacQueen, John M. Good, Gordon L. Wesley, Gary J. Hill, Povilas Palunas, Pedro R. Segura, Robert E. Calder

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6267, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes; 62673W (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.672694
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2006, Orlando, Florida , United States

Abstract

A major performance upgrade for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is in the conceptual design phase. The extensive upgrade will include a wide field optical corrector, a new HET tracker with increased payload capacity, and improved telescope pointing and tracking accuracy. The improvements will support the HET Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), which seeks to characterize the evolution of dark energy by mapping the imprint of baryonic oscillations on the large scale structure of the Universe. HETDEX will use the increased field-of-view and payload to feed an array of approximately 145 fiber-fed spectrometers, called VIRUS for "Visible Integral field Replicable Unit Spectrograph". The new corrector will have a science field-of-view diameter of 18 arcminutes, in contrast to the original corrector's 4 arcminute field, a twenty-fold increase in area. A new HET tracker with increased payload capacity will be designed to support the wide field corrector. Improved pointing and tracking will be accomplished using new autocollimation and distance measuring metrology combined with real-time wavefront sensing and correction. The upgrade will maintain operation of the current suite of facility instruments, consisting of low, medium, and high resolution spectrometers.

Citation Download Citation

John A. Booth, Phillip J. MacQueen, John M. Good, Gordon L. Wesley, Gary J. Hill, Povilas Palunas, Pedro R. Segura, and Robert E. Calder "The wide field upgrade for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope", Proc. SPIE 6267, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes, 62673W (23 June 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.672694

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