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Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope
The Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) is a modern 4.1 m aperture optical & near-IR telescope located on Cerro Pachon, Chile at 2738 meters elevation. It was commissioned in 2003, and is operated by a consortium including the countries of Brazil and Chile, Michigan State University, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) , and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The telescope attains median image quality 0.7 arcsec at 0.5 mm wavelength. Multiple instruments are available on standby, mounted at Nasmyth and bent-Cassegrain foci. Switching is accomplished within a few minutes by rotating the 45 tertiary mirror. This mirror is adjusted at high speed to prevent image blur from vibrations induced by wind-shake of the telescope structure.
Current (9/2007) instruments are
UVoptical 16-million pixel imager
near-infrared (12.4 mm wavelength) 1-million pixel HgCdTe imager and spectrograph
Additional instruments are scheduled to be commissioned in 2008 and 2009
UVoptical 16-million pixel imager and spectrograph
near-infrared (12.4 mm wavelength) 16-million pixel HgCdTe imager
near-infrared (15 mm wavelength) 1-million pixel high spectral resolution stellar spectrograph
adaptive optics module
UVoptical 16-million pixel integral-field spectrograph
US astronomers access the telescope remotely over the Abilene Network. Chilean and Brazilian astronomers use their high-speed networks. An on-site operator controls where the telescope points while the remote astronomer controls the instrument and data retrieval.
See also
List of largest optical reflecting telescopes
External links
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope
