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Constructed
in the early 1960s and seeing first light on September 15, 1964,
the 2.1-meter
(84-inch) telescope was one of the earliest Kitt Peak telescopes.
The telescope is used for both imaging and spectroscopy.
The history of the 2.1-meter
includes many important
discoveries in astrophysics, such as indications of very distant clouds
of hydrogen gas, known as the Lyman-alpha forest, the first gravitational
lens, the first pulsating white dwarf. It has also been used
to imagie planetary
nebula such as the Ring
Nebula, and in the first comprehensive study of the binary
sequence of solar type stars.
The visitor gallery is open to the public
and offers an interior view of the telescope.
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This telescope
is equipped with a slumped Pyrex primary mirror, one of the first
of its kind, weighing 3,000 lbs and polished to 4 millionths
of an inch. The mirror is coated with reflective aluminum at
a thickness of one thousandth of a human hair. Its relatively
fast focal ratio, f/2.63, allows a relatively fast Cassegrain
focus. A short telescope tube and a small, inexpensive dome characterize
telescope designs of that era. The 2.1-meter
telescope has an equatorial mounting with an axis at 32 degrees.
The white cylinder at the bottom of the telescope
is Phoenix,
a new, world-class, high resolution infrared spectrograph.
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The ancillary shed, to the left,
houses a separate mirror used to send light to the Coudé
Spectrograph a large optical spectrograph used primarily
for stellar observing. This facility is known as the Coudé
Feed. |
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The 2.1-meter
was originally equipped with an imaging
camera, and several spectrographs. Instrumentation rapidly
evolved to include such instruments as the Intensified
Image Dissector Scanner, the Video Camera, and IR photometers.
Current instrumentation includes modern IR array cameras and
spectrometers, the GoldCam Spectrograph (with a CCD incorporated
into the original Gold Spectrograph), a CCD imager and the Phoenix
infrared spectrometer. |
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