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 eld centered at the zenith. Located near Vancouver, British Columbia, it is equipped with a low-noise 2048 2048-pixel CCD detector, operating in TDI mode, which produces continuous imaging of a 20 0 wide strip of sky with 2-minute integration time. Images with FWHM of 2 00 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 lters, designed to produce 40-point spectral energy distributions from 0.4 to 1.0 um of all detected objects. These will allow classi cation and redshift estimation of approximately 10 4 galaxies and 10 3 quasars to a limiting magnitude of R ' 21.

Cosmology at low redshifts

“…Appendix A elaborates on how this estimate was reached. Table 2 in Hickson et al (1994) gives the cost breakdown of an observatory that housed a 2.7-m LMT. The costs in Table A.1 compared to those of an observatory that was constructed and operated seem reasonable, considering the difference in size.…”

“…Two of them are used for lidar research in the atmospheric sciences (Sica et al 1995;Wuerker 1997). Two of them (UBC-LAVAL 2.65-m, Hickson et al 1994, and NASA Optical Debris Observatory (NODO), Hickson & Mulrooney 1997) have been used for astronomical research. The NODO 3-m is particularly relevant because its operation, although it underwent significant R&D at its beginnings, was a professionally run operation.…”

First results from the UBC etch-alignment mosaic CCD

“…A 6 meter liquid mirror telescope (LMT) is being constructed near Vancouver BC Canada for a dedicated survey of large scale structure in the universe 11 . We are using our mosaic technique to fabricate a 4k x 4k CCD mosaic (four 2kx2k 15µm pixel CCDs) to operate in time-delay and integrate (TDI) mode 12 .…”

Characterization and closed-loop performance of a liquid mirror adaptive optical system

“…Liquids have been used as reflecting optical surfaces in astronomy for a long time-from rotating mercury liquid mirrors [1][2][3] to magnetically deformable ferromagnetic liquid mirrors [4]. Because of the dissipative nature of those systems, their shaped liquid surfaces are not stable: once the driving mechanism of the rotating mercury mirrors is stopped, the liquid level will equalize and the parabolic shape will be lost.…”