Magellan Telescopes

The Magellan telescopes are optical telescopes at Las Campanas two Observatory in Chile.

Description

They have a diameter of 6.5 meters and are after the astronomer Walter Baade and the philanthropist Landon Clay named. Unlike other telescopes of similar size their optical setup is not the Cassegrain arrangement follows, but is Gregory telescopes. The primary mirror is made of borosilicate glass and has a parabolic shape with an aperture ratio of 1:1.25. The secondary mirror has a diameter of about 1.8 m; together they have an aperture ratio of 1:11. A planner tertiary mirror can deflect the optical path to different instruments. The telescope has an active optics and a system to compensate for atmospheric disturbances, which can also be used to extend the visual angle of 6 ' to 24'. The telescopes have an alt- azimuth mount.

The Baade telescope received the first pictures on September 15, 2000 and the Clay telescope at September 7, 2002 ..

The telescopes were the Carnegie Institution of Washington (now Carnegie Institution for Science ) and are built as well as other, smaller instruments of the Observatory of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena (California ) managed.

Instruments

The " Clay" telescope has a number of imaging and spektrogrpahischen instruments:

• MagIC, Magellan Instant Camera, a direct CCD image sensor
• LDSS3, Low Dispersion Survey Spectrograph, efficient far- field multi-gap spectrograph
• MIKE, Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle, low-loss double - echelle spectrograph
• MIKE Fibers, Glasfasereinkopplung for MIKE on observation of multiple objects.

For the " Baade " telescope, the following instruments are available:

• PANIC, Persson 's Auxiliary Nasmyth Infrared Camera, an infrared camera
• IMACS, Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph, a wide-field camera and spectrometer for multiple objects