Mercator Telescope

The Mercator telescope is a 1.2 m telescope, operated by the Belgian Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in collaboration with the Observatory of the University of Geneva. Named the telescope is named after the famous cartographer of the 16th century Gerhard Mercator.

It is part of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory of the Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma.

Together with the Swiss Leonhard Euler telescope telescopes were both part of the Southern Sky Extrasolar Planet Search Programs, the number of extrasolar planets could discover.

Instruments

The telescope currently contains two different measuring devices.

MeropeII

The MeropeII is a CCD camera with a resolution of 2,000 × 6,000 pixels. The frame transfer detector was originally planned as a sensor for the canceled Eddington space mission.

MeropeII used the filters of the Geneva photometric system UB1B2BVV1G ( engl. The Geneva photometric system).

HERMES

The second instrument at the Mercator telescope is the HERMES echelle spectrograph. This covers wavelengths between 380 nm and 875 nm from a spectral resolution of.

P7

The P7 photometer was active from May 2001 to in July 2008. Again, this measure at The Geneva photometric System. It identified the same time the light of the star and the sky background so that it could be removed in the processing. The filter case from the filter replaced with a frequency of 4 Hz.

More

• List of largest optical telescopes.
• European Northern Observatory
• European Southern Observatory