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Current status of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope wide field upgrade

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References

2012

Year

Gary J. Hill, John A. Booth, Mark E. Cornell, John M. Good, Karl Gebhardt, Herman Kriel, Hanshin Lee, Ron Leck, Wálter Moreira, Phillip J. MacQueen,
Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Abstract

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is an innovative large telescope of 9.2 meter aperture, located in West Texas at the McDonald Observatory (MDO). The HET operates with a fixed segmented primary and has a tracker which moves the four-mirror corrector and prime focus instrument package to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of objects. A major upgrade of the HET is in progress that will increase the pupil size to 10 meters and the field of view to 22′ by replacing the corrector, tracker and prime focus instrument package. In addition to supporting the existing suite of instruments, this wide field upgrade will feed a revolutionary new integral field spectrograph called VIRUS, in support of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEXχ). This paper discusses the current status of this upgrade.