The Planewave Instruments 20-inch (0.5-meter) f/6.8 corrected Dall Kirkham telescope is shown here with its designer Joe Haberman at Mt. Kent Observatory in Queensland, Australia. Its identical companion is at Moore Observatory in Kentucky. The corrected Dall Kirkham provides a unique wide, extremely well-corrected, field ideal for CCD imaging and photometry. The telescopes at Mt. Kent and at Moore Observatory are on prototype Celestron computer-controlled German equatorial mountings that run on the NexStar control system. They are operated remotely over Internet2 with our XmTel software.
The telescope at Mt. Kent Observatory was installed in April 2006 and has been in routine use since then. The corrected Dall Kirkham design maintains a fixed primary-secondary spacing to minimize aberrations, and focuses by moving the camera into the focal plane. The focuser on this telescope has a motor driven encoded screw drive and is exceptionally stable, typically maintaining good focus night after night. The focal scale of 59.7 arcseconds per millimeter provides a 27.5x18.3 arcminute field of view with the SBIG STL6303 camera that is its primary detector. The camera incorporates a photometric UBVRI filter set which is used both for photometry and for RGB imaging. A conventional RGBCL set is also available.
In normal remote operation the telescope is autoguided by an SBIG STV guider using a short focal length auxiliary lens. Drift scan or time delay integration (TDI) imaging is under development for long exposure robotic operation. In TDI mode a swath of sky 27.5 arcminutes wide is swept across the CCD at sidereal rate, allowing integration times from 1 to 2 minutes and fields several degrees across. For remote operation TDI integration offers long exposures without the need to guide, and the data rate, typically 30 CCD lines per second, is compatible with slower networks while offering an image for educational use that pans the sky continuously.
Instrumentation to be available for remote operation of the telescopes includes
The Mt. Kent photo gallery has more views of the observatory, telescope, and instrumentation.
Images taken with the telescopes which demonstrate the exceptional resolution and wide field are available in the Southern Skies Gallery.
These telescopes are used by the Digital Science Partnership, a collaboration of the University of Southern Queensland, the University of Louisville, and Northern Kentucky University that provides remote and robotic astronomical instrumentation for university students, as well as continuuing and distance education in Kentucky and Australia. We offer hand-on training for teachers through the facilities of the Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium, and we will soon offer in-class tours and interactive sessions with astronomers through web-based resources directly to Internet2-connected classrooms.
