The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is an innovative 10m-class telescope that operates with a fixed-altitude segmented spherical primary mirror (M1) while a tracker, located at the top of the telescope, moves the prime-focus spherical aberration corrector (SAC) and instrument package in order to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of celestial objects. In 2016, we completed the wide-field upgrade of the telescope, which includes the Wide-Field Corrector (WFC), the tracker, the prime focus instrument package, and all electromechanical hardware and telescope control software. Post the upgrade, we have been monitoring the imaging performance of the telescope through the in-situ metrology systems. These systems highlight weak spots of the telescope facility in imaging performance and provide quantitative guidance to specific facility repair and/or upgrades to further improve the HET’s overall performance. This paper discusses our long-range (7yrs) datasets, specific analysis techniques used, and current outcomes of this investigative effort in the context of specific facility improvement and upgrade plans.
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is an innovative large telescope with 10 meter aperture, located in West Texas at the McDonald Observatory. The HET operates with a fixed segmented primary and has a tracker, which moves the fourmirror corrector and prime focus instrument package to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of objects. We have completed a major multi-year upgrade of the HET that has substantially increased the field of view to 22 arcminutes by replacing the optical corrector, tracker, and prime focus instrument package and by developing a new telescope control system. The upgrade has replaced all hardware and systems except for the structure, enclosure, and primary mirror. The new, reinvented wide-field HET feeds the revolutionary Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS‡), fed by 35,000 fibers, in support of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX§), a new low resolution spectrograph (LRS2), the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF), and the upgraded high resolution spectrograph (HRS2). The HET Wide Field Upgrade has now been commissioned and has been in science operations since mid 2016 and in full science operations from mid 2018. This paper reviews and summarizes the upgrade, lessons learned, and the operational performance of the new HET.
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