Maintaining a high-paced rollout, LCOGT shipped two more 1-meter production telescopes today. Bound for Australia and the Siding Spring Observatory, the telescopes will bring the total number of 1-meters to nine. A team lead by LCOGT technician Kurt Vander Horst will travel to Australia in May to install them.
Australia "A" 1-meter telescope in truck heading south
"This will complete our southern ring," stated founder Wayne Rosing. Eight of the nine telescopes are located at approximately 30 degrees latitude in the Southern Hemisphere. Three were installed at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) last October, and three at the South Africa Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) near Sutherland, South Africa, in February of this year.
Three telescopes at a site allow for multiple observations at any given time, and for a selection of instruments. Each telescope offers a primary science camera and a lucky imaging camera. The NRES spectroscope, currently in development, will be fed by fiber optic cable from two telescopes at each site. The three geographically distributed nodes allow observations to be captured from the optimal position on the earth, and, should weather cause closures, observations can be pushed to the next dark site in the network.
Vander Horst saw the truck carrying the telescopes off from the company's Goleta headquarters earlier today. "Many thanks to everyone who made this possible and contributed along the way. It was a huge team effort and would not, could not, have happened otherwise." Each telescope, he explained, is manufactured, cabled, and tested in the warehouse except for the fragile and expensive mirrors. The telescopes are then broken down into a shipping configuration and packed.
LCOGT node at Siding Spring showing Faulkes Telescope South to the left, and two new 1-meter domes awaiting telescopes
The other seven telescopes are currently on-sky and being used for minor engineering tests and for LCOGT internal science projects with participation from St Andrews University, a key partner with LCOGT. In addition, LCOGT's network telescope scheduler is running two of the telescopes, one in South Africa and one in Chile, to fully test the first release of this important toolset. The one telescope not in the south is located at McDonald Observatory in Texas. This telescope was the first production telescope completed and provided a dark observatory site close to headquarters where on-sky testing could be completed.
