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

  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.

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