Building big telescopes on mountain tops is one solution, but Hubble offers an even better view. Astronomers attempting to get a good view of very distant objects in the universe have problems doing that from Earth’s surface, thanks to obstructions from clouds, light pollution and the distorting effects of the atmosphere. Hubble’s launch in 1990 was motivated by the idea that the best view of space is from space itself. The HET is a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin, Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.The first major optical telescope in space, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is most famous for the iconic and beautiful images it has brought us of distant galaxies.
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This survey looks back 11 billion years to determine if dark energy has changed over time. HET is currently involved in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), a project to study dark energy, the mysterious force causing the universe’s rate of expansion to speed up. Queue scheduling makes sure that the HET is used efficiently, and makes the telescope especially well-suited to studying targets of opportunity - those events in the heavens that arise without warning, such as exploding stars. Each night, a resident astronomer decides which project is best suited to be carried out, based on factors like priority ranking of the projects, weather, and Moon phase. Astronomers submit proposals for research and selected projects are scheduled for completion within a four-month period. The wide-field Hobby-Eberly Telescope focuses light into instruments including the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), the second generation Low Resolution Spectrograph (LRS2), the Habitable Zone Planet Finder and the second generation High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS2). The telescope is especially suited to conduct large survey projects using spectroscopy and take on the biggest challenges in astronomy today: unraveling the mystery of dark energy, probing distant galaxies and black holes, discovering and characterizing planets around other stars and much more. Looking at the 91 segments of HET's mirror through the open dome HET is classified as a 10-meter telescope, making it the third largest optical telescope in the world. The segments must be aligned exactly to form a perfect reflecting surface for good observations. It's made up of 91 hexagonal mirrors that form a reflecting surface measuring 11 by 10 meters. The telescope's mirror looks like a honeycomb. The 80-ton telescope rotates on a bed of air, using air cushions to lift and position the enormous instrument. However, the tracker mounted above the telescope moves in six directions, allowing the HET to study 70 percent of the visible sky. Unlike most other telescopes, which tilt up and down in altitude, the HET's mirror is always tilted at 55 degrees above the horizon.
Big telescope upgrade#
In 2016, a multiyear $40 Million upgrade was completed, expanding the telescope’s field of view to an area of sky 120 times larger than before. This makes it ideal in searching for planets around other stars, studying distant galaxies, exploding stars, black holes and more.įirst dedicated in 1997, the telescope's unique design allowed for construction of a very large modern telescope at a fraction of the cost of similarly sized instruments. It was designed specifically for spectroscopy, the decoding of light from stars and galaxies to study their properties.
With its 11-meter (433-inch) mirror, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is one of the world's largest optical telescopes.
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