Ubc/Laval 2.7-Meter Liquid Mirror Telescope
Abstract
We report the successful development and operation of a large astronomical liquid-mirror telescope. Employing a rotating 2.7-meter diameter mirror with a surface of liquid mercury, the telescope images a half-degree diameter field centered at the zenith. Located near Vancouver, British Columbia, it is equipped with a low-noise 2048x2048-pixel CCD detector, operating in TDI mode, which produces continuous imaging of a 20 arcminute-widestrip of sky with 2 minute integration time. Images with FWHM of 2 arcseconds or less are regularly obtained. This image quality is limited only by atmospheric seeing and star-trail curvature. The telescope is equipped with a series of narrow-band filters, designed to produce 40-point spectral energy distributions from 0.4 to 1.0 microns of all detected objects. These will allow classification and redshift estimation of approximately 25,000 galaxies and 1,000 quasars to a limiting magnitude of R~21.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9406057,
title = {Ubc/Laval 2.7-Meter Liquid Mirror Telescope},
author = {P. Hickson and E. F. Borra and R. Cabanac and R. Content and B. K. Gibson and G. A. H. Walker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9406057},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, 15 pages + 4 figures, uuencoded compressed PostScript, UBC-200694