C. Donald Shane telescope

C. Donald Shane telescope
C. Donald Shane 3m telescope at the Lick observatory on Mt. Hamilton, San Jose, California - as seen from inside the dome.
Named after C. Donald Shane Edit this on Wikidata
Observatory Lick Observatory Edit this on Wikidata
Location(s) United States
Coordinates 37°20′35″N 121°38′14″W / 37.343036°N 121.637136°W / 37.343036; -121.637136Coordinates: 37°20′35″N 121°38′14″W / 37.343036°N 121.637136°W / 37.343036; -121.637136 Edit this at Wikidata
Telescope style Optical telescope Edit this on Wikidata
Website www.ucolick.org/public/telescopes/shane.html Edit this at Wikidata
Location of C. Donald Shane telescope

The C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California. It was named after astronomer C. Donald Shane in 1978, who led the effort to acquire the necessary funds from the California Legislature, and who then oversaw the telescope's construction. It is the largest and most powerful telescope at the Lick Observatory, and was the second-largest telescope in the world when it was commissioned in 1959.[1]

The Shane's mirror started as a 10,000-pound Corning Labs glass test blank for the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch (5-m) Hale telescope (in north San Diego County, California), but was sold below cost ($50,000)[1] by Caltech to the Lick Observatory.[1] It was then transported to Mount Hamilton, where the blank was ground and polished by the observatory.[1]

Features

The telescope can be used with three different focal stations: wide field prime focus, coudé focus for high precision spectroscopy, or the intermediate cassegrain focus.

In the Shane dome there is a laser, whose light is sometimes visible with the naked eye, that the observatory beams from the Shane telescope into the night sky. The laser is part of the Lick Adaptive Optics (LAO) program, a joint project of the Lick Observatory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LAO corrects for atmospheric turbulence either by using a natural guide star or by creating a sodium laser guide star, and using the observed motion of the guide star to direct distortion of a deformable mirror hundreds of times each second. The system produces images that are nearly equivalent to those obtained from space-based telescopes. Adaptive optics using natural guide stars has been in development since 1996, and using laser guide stars since 2001. Similar laser adaptive optics systems based on LAO have been installed on the University of California's two Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

Instrumentation currently in operation at the Shane telescope includes:[2]

History

The dome housing the Shane telescope

For Lick Observatory's first 55 years of operation, its astronomers relied on two telescopes built in the 19th century. Once considered giants in the field, they had become obsolete. International competition was mounting. The 120-inch reflector addition took 15 years to complete, being completed in 1959. It would be the second-largest telescope in the world, taking its place behind the then enormous 200-inch Palomar Hale Telescope.

Contemporaries on commissioning

The Shane telescope saw first light to a different world for large telescopes in 1959:

# Name /
Observatory		 Image Aperture Altitude First
Light		 Special advocate
1 Hale Telescope
Palomar Obs.		 200 inch
508 cm		 1713 m
(5620 ft)		 1948 George Ellery Hale
John D. Rockefeller
2 Shane Telescope
Lick Observatory		 120 inch
305 cm		 1283 m
(4209 ft)		 1959 Nicholas Mayall
C. Donald Shane
3 Hooker Telescope
Mount Wilson Obs.		 100 inch
254 cm		 1742 m
(5715 ft)		 1917 George Ellery Hale
Andrew Carnegie
4 Otto Struve Telescope
McDonald Obs.		 82 inch
210 cm		 2,070 m
6791 ft		 1939 Otto Struve

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Mt. Hamilton Telescopes: Carnegie Double Astrograph
  2. ↑ "Lick Observatory Shane Telescope web site". Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  3. ↑ McGurk, Rosalie; et al. (2014). "Commissioning ShARCS: the Shane Adaptive optics infraRed Camera-Spectrograph for the Lick Observatory 3-m telescope". Proceedings of the SPIE. 9148: 91483A. arXiv:1407.8205. doi:10.1117/12.2057027. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
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