Delivery, installation, on-sky verification of the Hobby Eberly Telescope wide field corrector

Hanshin Lee; Gary J. Hill; John M. Good; Brian L. Vattiat; Matthew Shetrone; Herman Kriel; Jerry Martin; Emily Schroeder; Chang Jin Oh; Eric Frater; Bryan Smith; James H. Burge

doi:10.1117/12.2231224

8 August 2016 Delivery, installation, on-sky verification of the Hobby Eberly Telescope wide field corrector

Hanshin Lee, Gary J. Hill, John M. Good, Brian L. Vattiat, Matthew Shetrone, Herman Kriel, Jerry Martin, Emily Schroeder , Chang Jin Oh, Eric Frater, Bryan Smith, James H. Burge

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9906, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VI; 990646 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2231224
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET)†, located in West Texas at the McDonald Observatory, operates with a fixed segmented primary (M1) and has a tracker, which moves the prime-focus corrector and instrument package to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of objects. We have completed a major multi-year upgrade of the HET that has substantially increased the pupil size to 10 meters and the field of view to 22 arcminutes by deploying the new Wide Field Corrector (WFC), new tracker system, and new Prime Focus Instrument Package (PFIP). The focus of this paper is on the delivery, installation, and on-sky verification of the WFC. We summarize the technical challenges encountered and resolutions to overcome such challenges during the construction of the system. We then detail the transportation from Tucson to the HET, on-site ground verification test results, post-installation static alignment among the WFC, PFIP, and M1, and on-sky verification of alignment and image quality via deploying multiple wavefront sensors across 22 arcminutes field of view. The new wide field HET will feed the revolutionary new integral field spectrograph called VIRUS, in support of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), a new low resolution spectrograph (LRS2), an upgraded high resolution spectrograph (HRS2), and later the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF).

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Hanshin Lee, Gary J. Hill, John M. Good, Brian L. Vattiat, Matthew Shetrone, Herman Kriel, Jerry Martin, Emily Schroeder , Chang Jin Oh, Eric Frater, Bryan Smith, and James H. Burge "Delivery, installation, on-sky verification of the Hobby Eberly Telescope wide field corrector", Proc. SPIE 9906, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes VI, 990646 (8 August 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2231224

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