Mercator telescope
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Telescope Mercator telescope |
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| The Mercator telescope over a sea of clouds as seen from the Swedish Solar Telescope | |
| Type | Parabolic mirror |
| Location |
La Palma , Canary Islands
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| height | 2,300 m |
| Geographic coordinates | 28 ° 45 '44 " N , 17 ° 52' 43" W |
| wavelength | Optically |
| Aperture | 1.2 m |
The Mercator Telescope is a 1,2 m - mirror telescope , operated by the Belgian Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in collaboration with the Observatory of the University of Geneva . The telescope is named after the famous cartographer of the 16th century Gerhard Mercator .
It is part of the Roque de los Muchachos observatory on the Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma .
Together with the Swiss Leonhard Euler Telescope , it was part of the Southern Sky Extrasolar Planet Search Program : Numerous extrasolar planets were discovered.
Instruments
The telescope currently contains two different measuring devices.
MeropeII
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 uses the filters UB 1 B 2 BVV 1 G of the Geneva photometric system (engl. The Geneva photometric system ).
HERMES
The second instrument on the Mercator telescope is the HERMES Echelle spectrograph . This covers wavelengths between 380 n m and 875 nm with a spectral resolution of from.
P7
The P7 - photometer was active from May 2001 to July 2008. This is also measured in Geneva photometric system . It simultaneously determined the light of a star and its sky background, so that this could be subtracted during processing. The filter wheel exchanged the filters with a frequency of 4 Hz .