New 1.3m Warsaw University Telescope
Las Campanas Observatory, Chile
Control building (left) and the dome
The telescope and its instruments
Telescope technical data:
- 1.3m (51") primary mirror diameter
- 1:9.2 (1:2.8 primary) Ritchey-Chretién system; 17.4 arcsec/mm
focal scale
- 3-element field corrector -- 1.5 arcdeg diffraction limited field
(80% of light within 0.5 arcsec diameter)
- Ultra Low Expansion (ULE) glass mirrors
- Fully automated, computer controlled operation
- Fork, paralactic mount, friction drives (no backlash) allowing any
tracking rate in RA and DEC
- Light, steel enclosure with Ash-dome dome, easy ventilation
(louvers on telescope and ground level). Minimalization of heat sources
in the telescope building
- Remote control of the telescope and instruments from "control
building" located 15 m away from the telescope building. Possibility of
remote control over the Internet
- First "optical" light Feb 9, 1996, first "electronic" light Jul
18, 1996
CCD Camera
- "Zero generation" single chip camera
- SITe 2048 x 2048 thin chip
- 90% QE over wide range from B to I,
also some sensitivity in U
- 0.4 arcsec/pixel scale
- 5 e readout noise at 3.8 e/ADU (16-bit ADC: 65535 levels)
- modular control system developed at Warsaw University Observatory
- easily expandable to multi-chip mosaic, next generation cameras
Auto-Guiding System and Filter Wheel
- 512 x 512 pixels EEV CCD37 detector driven by the same
electronics as scientific CCD (2.2 by 2.2 arcmin field)
- Automatic positioning of the guider probe with accuracy of 2
pixels over the entire field of view
- Automatically positioned filter wheel with 7 slots for up to 16 cm
diameter filters. Standard UBVRI filters installed
The telescope is now fully dedicated to continuation of the Optical
Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE-II). As a first target, Large
Magellanic Cloud was chosen. We observe mainly in driftscan mode, with
the telescope drifting in declination at a rate of a few arc seconds per
time second. Single image is 8192x2048 pixels (55'x14') in size.
Take a look at sample images (250kB GIFs covering approx. 20'x14'
areas):
