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| Wise Observatory - Telescope & Instruments
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The Wise Observatory is equipped with a
Boller and Chivens telescope, which
is a wide field Ritchey-Chretien Reflector mounted on a rigid, off-axis
equatorial mount.
The optics is a Mount Wilson/Palomar
Observatories design, consisting of
- a 40 inch diameter clear aperture
f/4 primary mirror,
- a 20.1 inch diameter f/7 Cassegrain secondary
mirror, and
- a corrector quartz lens located 4 inches above the surface
of the primary mirror.
This setup provides a field of up to 2.5 degrees in
diameter with very little distortion.
A f/13.5 secondary mirror is also available. The secondary
mirror can be slightly inclined with a stepping motor.
The present most frequently used observing instruments are:
- Several CCD direct imaging Cameras
- The Faint Object
Spectrograph
and Camera - FOSC
(for spectroscopy, polarimetry, and
very rarely for imaging).
- LAIWO - Large Area
Imager at Wise
Observatory
- eShel
- R10000 echelle fiber-fed spectrograph
Each one of them can be
mounted at the f/7 focus of the telescope,
The FOSC is a general purpose instrument that permits imaging of a
17' diameter field through different filters and rapid change to
an operation mode of spectroscopy of point-like or extended objects,
within a few minutes and without refocusing the instrument. The FOSC
is patterned after the EFOSC instrument built by ESO, but realized on a
"shoestring" budget.
