The RCC telescope located at Piszkéstető Mountain Station is a Ritchey–Chrétien telescope with a primary mirror of 1m (or, more precisely, 40" = 1016mm) and has an effective focal ratio of f/13.5. The telescope is installed in the Mátészalka Dome, the largest dome at the site. An additional mirror is installed at the cross axis, allowing the optical system to optionally be extended to a coudé configuration. The telescope is hence referred as Ritchey–Chrétien-Coudé, or simply RCC. Currently, the optical coudé configuration is not exploited directly but used for extensive wiring (including optical fibers) for its various instrumentation.
History
The telescope has been constructed in 1974 and regular observations has been started in 1975. Its support building has been designed by Csaba Csontos.
Telescope motion and dome control
The RCC telescope can be controlled by the CCDSH command-line frontend using its modular extensions coined as PRCC environment. Due to the numerous available instruments (spectrograph, main focus camera, EMCCD), the ccdsh environment starts up only for controlling the telescope tube, telescope mount and the dome. Modules related to the various instruments can be loaded (and even changed at runtime) upon the needs of the observers.
Note that some of the subsystems of some of instruments are controlled outside from ccdsh. These are needed to be executed from the normal login shell (bash). In addition, the current implementaiton of the EMCCD is fully separated from ccdsh.
Current instrumentation
The currently available instruments on this telescope are:
See also this page for more details and the actual usage.
Gallery
| ||||||||
| |||||||||||