Telescopes and Receivers

• ALMA - The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is currently under construction in Chile. It will be sensitive in the range of 0.35 to 3.6 millimetres. Funding is being sought for receivers up to 10 millimetres.
  • Coordinates: latitude = 23°01'22.42" S, longitude = 67°45'17.44" W.
  • Elevation = 5017 m (16460 ft) above sea level.
• APEX - The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment is a collaboration between Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) in collaboration with Astronomisches Institut Ruhr-Universität Bochum (AIRUB) at 50%, Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) at 23%, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at 27% to construct and operate a modified ALMA prototype antenna as a single dish on the high altitude site of Llano Chajnantor. The telescope was supplied by VERTEX Antennentechnik in Duisburg, Germany.
• ATCA, the Australia Telescope Compact Array, at the Paul Wild Observatory is an array of six 22-m antennas used for radio astronomy. It is located about 25 km west of the town of Narrabri in rural NSW (about 500 km north-west of Sydney). It is operated by the Australia Telescope National Facility, a division of CSIRO, which also includes the ATNF Headquarters at Marsfield in Sydney, the Parkes Observatory and the Mopra Observatory near Coonabarabran.
  • Coordinates: latitude = 30°18'46.3849" S, longitude = 149°33'00.4997" E.
  • Elevation = 226.87 m (744.32 ft) above sea level.
• AzTEC is a 144-element bolometer array camera developed at the University of Massachusetts in collaboration with researchers at Caltech, Cardiff, INAOE, Sejong University, and Smith College. In its 1.1mm configuration, AzTEC is sensitive to the emission from a wide range of astronomical sources over all spatial scales and epochs. In particular, AzTEC is sensitive to the thermal emission of cool dust and the spectral distortion of the Cosmic Microwave Background due to the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect.
  AzTEC was commissioned on the JCMT during an initial run in June 2005 and then resided at the JCMT doing a series of scientific observations between November 2005 and February 2006. In April 2007 AzTEC was installed as a temporary facility instrument on the ASTE telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile. AzTEC will remain at ASTE until November 2008 when it will be relocated to its final home, the Large Millimeter Telescope.
• BIMA is a consortium of three university astronomy labs (from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana, and the University of Maryland). The consortium operated a millimetre-wave radio interferometer at Hat Creek, California (121.4733 W, 40.8178 N). The BIMA mm-wave array has now merged with the OVRO mm-wave array to form CARMA.
• CARMA - The Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy is the merger of two university-based millimetre arrays, the OVRO and BIMA arrays. CARMA is located at a new high-altitude site, Cedar Flat in eastern California.
  • Coordinates: 118°08'32" W, 37°16'43" N.
  • Elevation = 2200 m (7220 ft) above sea level.
  • Proposals for observations using CARMA during the period 1 December 2009 to 31 May 2010 are due on 5 August 2009.
• Ceduna 30m - The 30 metre Ceduna radio telescope is the main instrument at the Ceduna Radio Observatory, located near the town of Ceduna in South Australia. Originally the telescope was part of an Australia-wide telecommunications network but it was aquired in 1985 by the University of Tasmania and is now used as a radio telescope. The Ceduna antenna is the most western antenna in the Australian VLBI network (now that Perth is no longer used) making it an extremely important component.
  • Coordinates: 133°48'36.565" E, 31°52'05.04" S.
  • Elevation = 161 m (528 ft) above sea level.
• CSO - The Caltech Submillimeter Observatory consists of a 10.4-meter-diameter Leighton radio dish situated in a compact dome near the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawai'i. The telescope is operated by Caltech under a contract from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has been operating on a regular basis since 1988. It is open to the astronomical community, with most of the observing time available for non-Caltech observers.
  • Coordinates: 155°28'46.4" E, latitude 19°49'33.8" N.
  • Elevation = 4080 m (13386 ft) above sea level.
• Euro 50 - one of the two options that is being researched for an Extremely Large (optical) Telescope, the other one being the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL).
• Fermi - The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly GLAST, explores the universe as seen in gamma-ray radiation. For this mission NASA teamed up with the U.S. Department of Energy and institutions in France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Sweden. The spacecraft was built by General Dynamics and launched on 11 June 2008.
• GBT - The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is located at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's site in Green Bank, Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
  • Coordinates: 79°50'23.40" W, 38°25'59.23" N.
• Gemini - The Gemini Observatory consists of twin 8-metre optical/infrared telescopes located on two of the best sites on our planet for observing the universe. Together these telescopes can access the entire sky. The Gemini South telescope is located at almost 9,000' (2700 m) elevation on a mountain in the Chilean Andes called Cerro Pachon. The Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope is located on Hawaii's Mauna Kea at an altitude of almost 14,000' (4200 m).
• GLAST - The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, began its mission of exploring the universe in high-energy gamma rays on 11 June 2008. It was renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
• GMRT - The Giant Metrewave Telescope (GMRT), located 80 km north of Pune in India, is the world's largest array of radio telescopes at metre wavelengths. It is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay. The GMRT is made up of a total of 30 antennas, 14 of which are randomly arranged in the central square, with the other 16 arranged in a nearly "Y"-shaped array (similar to the VLA), giving an interferometric baseline of about 25 km. The antennas are 25 metres in diameter.
  • Coordinates: 74°2'59.07" E, 19°5'47.46" N.
  • Elevation = 650 m (2133 ft) above sea level.
• GMT - The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will open a new window on the universe for the 21st century. Scheduled for completion around 2018 and consisting of seven mirrors of some 8 metres in diameter each, the GMT will have the resolving power of a 24.5-meter (80 foot) primary mirror -- far larger than any other optical telescope ever built. It will answer many of the questions at the forefront of astrophysics today and will pose new and unanticipated riddles for future generations of astronomers. The GMT will produce images up to 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
• HartRAO - The Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) is located 50 km west of Johannesburg, South Africa. It operates as a National Research Facility under the auspices of the National Research Foundation (NRF). The main reflecting surface of the telescope is 26 metres in diameter and the telescope has a mass of 260 tons. It is equipped with radio receivers operating in microwave bands at wavelengths of 18, 13, 6, 5, 4.5, 3.5, and 2.5cm. For maximum sensitivity, all but one of these receivers are cooled to 16° above absolute zero (-257° Celcius). All observing is controlled by computer.
• Herschel - The Herschel Space Observatory ("Herschel") is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission originally proposed in 1982 by a consortium of European scientists. It is due for launch into orbit sometime in spring 2009. The satellite is then meant to enter an orbit of 700,000 km diameter at 1.5 million kilometres distance from the Earth. The mission will be the first space observatory to cover the full far infrared and submillimetre waveband, with the Photodetecting Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) operating at 55 to 210 micron, the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) operating at 194 to 672 micron, and the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) operating at 157 to 625 micron.
• HST - Named after the trailblazing astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953), the Hubble Space Telescope is a large, space-based observatory which has revolutionized astronomy by providing unprecedented deep and clear views of the Universe, ranging from our own solar system to extremely remote fledgling galaxies forming not long after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
• IRAS - The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) mission was a collaborative effort by the United States (NASA), the Netherlands (NIVR), and the United Kingdom (SERC).
• ISAAC - Infrared Spectrometer And Array Camera, mounted on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) ANTU telescope of the European Southern Observatory at Cerro Paranal
• JCMT - James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea
• Kunming 40m - The Kunming 40m radio telescope is located on the Phoenix Mountain just east of Kunming city, Yunnan Province, P.R. China. It is operated by the YunNan Astronomical Observatory (YNAO), which is an institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The Kunming 40m radio telescope started its work with a dual-frequency S/X Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observing system at the end of May 2006. The telescope successfully tracked the Chinese ChangE-1 lunar satellite and received its downlink data in 2007-2008. In addition to VLBI observations, the Yunnan Observatory staff is now trying to perform pulsar observations.
  • Coordinates: 102°47'42" E, 25°1'33" N.
  • Elevation: 1985 m (6512 ft) above sea level.
• LABOCA - LABOCA (Large Apex BOlometer CAmera) will be a bolometer array operating in the atmospheric window at 870 micron (345 GHz). It will have 295 channels arranged in a hexagonal layout consisting of a center channel and 9 concentric hexagons. The APEX beam size at this wavelength is 18" and the total field of view for LABOCA is 11'.4. Note that the array is undersampled on the sky; the separation between channels in one row is twice the beam size (36"). Therefore it is necessary to use special observing techniques such as scanning or jiggling to produce fully sampled maps.
• LAMOST - The Chinese-built Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) is located 170 km northeast of Beijing at the Xinglong Observing Station of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Astronomical Observatories. The LAMOST optical system consists of a spherical primary mirror at its southern end and a reflecting corrector with a focal length of 20 metres. Both the primary mirror and the focal plane are fixed to the ground. The telescope's focal plane is wired with 4,000 fiber optic probes, which are all connected to dozens of spectroscopic instruments that can obtain the spectra of 4,000 celestial objects at a time. In 2010 LAMOST will undergo testing and the telescope will be officially put to work in 2011.
• LAT - The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is the high-energy gamma-ray instrument on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
• LBA - The Australian Long Baseline Array is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, utilising VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) techniques & using telescopes all over Australia to enable high resolution imaging and spectroscopy.
• LMT - Large Millimeter Telescope.
• MERLIN - Merlin stands for the Multi-Element Radio-Linked Interferometer Network, Jodrell Bank's array of six observing stations that together form a powerful telescope with an effective aperture of over 217 kilometres. At a wavelength of six centimeters MERLIN has a maximum resolution of 40 mas, about twenty times better than can commonly be achieved by the best ground-based telescopes, and comparable to the HST. Such resolving power is equivalent to measuring the diameter of a one-pound coin from a distance of 100 kilometres.
• Beijing Miyun Telescope - The Miyun telescope is located at Bulaotun, a little town in Miyun County. The town is located some 140 km from downtown Beijing. On 5 August 2009, a successful test was done with the Miyun 50m, the Kunming 40m, and four stations of the European VLBI Network (EVN). In view of the location, the EVN u-v coverage is improved considerably with addition of the Miyun telescope. This image shows what the Miyun telescope looks like. As of August 2009, the telescope is equipped with a cooled S/X receiver and a UHF receiver. The Miyun telescope has been used to receive the downlink data for China's first lunar probe Chang'e 1 and to determine its orbit. Besides the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP), the Miyun station also joins the "Meridian Project" to study interplanetary scintillation.
  • Coordinates: 116.9 E, 40.5 N.
• Mopra - The Mopra telescope is a 22-m radio and mm-wave antenna nestling in the foothills of the Warrumbungle National Park and 30 km from the township of Coonabarabran. It is currently the largest single-dish mm-wave telescope in the southern hemisphere.
  • Coordinates: 149°05'58.706" E, 31°16'04.127" S.
  • Elevation: 866.44 m (2842.62 ft) above sea level.
• NANTEN2 - The NANTEN2 Observatory (NANTEN is Japanese for southern sky) is a collaboration between research institutes in Japan (Nagoya and Osaka University), South Korea (Seoul National University), Germany (KOSMA, Universität zu Köln, Argelander-Institut Universität Bonn), and Chile (Universidad de Chile). The observatory is located at 4865 m altitude on Pampa la Bola in the Atacama desert, Chile. Operation started in May 2006. Equipped with a 4 m submillimeter telescope, NANTEN2 will be used to survey the southern sky in molecular and atomic spectral lines between 110 and 880 GHz (2.6 mm to 350 µm). The highest observing frequencies are covered by the KOSMA SMART receiver, a dual-frequency, 2x8 pixel array receiver operating between 460 and 880 GHz, and KOSMA array Acousto Optical Spectrometers (AOS) as backends.
  • Coordinates: 67°42'08" W, 22°57'47" S.
  • Elevation = 4865 m (15961 ft) above sea level.
• OVRO, the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, is the largest university-operated radio observatory in the world. The observatory is located near Bishop, California, approximately 250 miles north of Los Angeles on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. The major instruments at the observatory are the 40-Meter Telescope and the Solar Array. The OVRO Millimeter-Wavelength Array was dismantled, and its antennas are now part of the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA).
  • Coordinates: 118.2822 W, 37.2339 N.
  • Elevation: 1222 m above sea level.
• OWL - OverWhelmingly Large Telescope, a 60- to 130-metre large optical telescope that is being considered by a collaboration between the European Southern Observatory, large European universities and industries.
• Parkes - The Parkes Observatory is a 64-metre Telescope used for Radio Astronomy. It is located about 20 kilometres North of Parkes along the Newell Highway, which is approximately 380 kilometres West of Sydney. It is operated by the Australia Telescope National Facility, a division of CSIRO, which also includes the ATNF Headquarters at Marsfield in Sydney, the Compact Array and Mopra Observatory near Coonabarabran and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder.
  • Coordinates: 148°15'54.636" E, 32°59'48.636" S.
  • Elevation = 414.8 m (1360.9 ft) above sea level.
• Pierre Auger Observatory - The Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory is studying ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), the most energetic particles in the universe. When these rare particles strike the earth's atmosphere, they produce extensive air showers made of billions of particles. While cosmic rays with low to moderate energies are well understood, those with extremely high energies remain mysterious.
• PDBI - The Plateau de Bure Interferometer.
• SABOCA - The Submillimetre APEX Bolometer Camera, a 39-channel bolometer array operating at 350 micron, will be commissioned on the APEX 12m telescope on Chajnantor in September 2008.
• SCUBA - The Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array, mounted on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea
• SEST - The Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope is a 15m diameter radio telescope, which operated in the frequency range 70 - 365 GHz. It was built in 1987 on the ESO site of La Silla, in the Chilean Andes, at an altitude of 2400 metres. The telescope, as its name implies, was built on behalf of The Swedish Research Council and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). For a long time, it was the only large (sub)millimetre telescope in the southern hemisphere. On the Swedish side SEST was operated by the Swedish National Facility for Radio Astronomy, Onsala Space Observatory at Chalmers University of Technology, which was responsible for the receivers and the computer software. ESO was responsible for the mechanical and computer hardware maintenance as well as maintenance of the control building.
  • Coordinates: 70.7344 W, 29.2594 S.
  • Elevation: 2400 m above sea level.
• SHARC - Submillimetre High Angular Resolution Camera, mounted on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) on Mauna Kea.
• SHARC-II - SHARC-II operates at the Caltech Submillimeter Observeratory (CSO). It is the world's first facilty "CCD-style" bolometer array, and employs "pop-up" detector technology to form a 12x32 pixel array. Unlike many other bolometer arrays, SHARC-II does not (typically) use chopping to remove the sky background. By sampling the bolometers every 33msec, we can use the "total power" data to estimate the sky contribution and remove it in software.
• Sheshan - The Sheshan 25m radio telescope is an alt-az antenna run by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The telescope is located in the Sheshan area, about 40 km west of Shanghai. The radio telescope has been in operation since 1987 and it is one of the five main facilities of the Chinese National Astronomical Observatories (NAOC). The station is a member of the European VLBI Network (EVN), the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS), and the Asia Pacific Telescope (APT).
  • Coordinates: 121.1997 E, 31.0992 N.
  • Elevation: 5 m above sea level.
• SINFONI, the Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared, is a near-infrared (1.1 - 2.45 µm) integral-field spectrograph fed by an adaptive optics module, currently installed at the Cassegrain focus of Yepun (UT4), one of the VLT units. The spectrograph operates with 4 gratings (J, H, K, H+K), providing a spectral resolution around 2000, 3000, 4000 in J, H, K, respectively, and 1500 in H+K - each wavelength band fitting fully on the 2048 pixels of the Hawaii 2RG (2kx2k) detector in the dispersion direction. The spatial resolution is selectable from 0.25", 0.1", to 0.025" per image slice, which corresponds to a field-of-view of 8"x8", 3"x3", or 0.8"x0.8", respectively. The instrument can also be used for seeing-limited open-loop observations.
• SKA, the Square Kilometre Array is a radio telescope that will have a collecting area of a square kilometre. It will operate in the range from 10 millimetre up to several metres.
• SKADS - the SKADS Consortium consists of 29 institutes in eight EC countries (the main contributors being the UK, The Netherlands, France and Italy) and four non-EC countries (Australia, South Africa, Canada and Russia). The consortium has submitted a research proposal to the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) to further develop and demonstrate the Aperture Array concept suitable for the SKA, the Square Kilometre Array, a million square metres of collecting area, the next major radio telescope to be built.
• SMA - The Submillimeter Array (SMA) is an 8-element radio interferometer located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Operating at frequencies from 180 GHz to 700 GHz, the 6m dishes may be arranged into configurations with baselines as long as 509m, producing a synthesized beam of sub-arcsecond width. Each element can observe with two receivers simultaneously, with 2 GHz bandwidth each. The digital correlator backend allows flexible allocation of thousands of spectral channels to each receiver. The Submillimeter Array is a joint project between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academia Sinica.
  • Coordinates of the Mauna Kea Observatories: latitude = 19°45'32.4" N, longitude = 155°27'22.8" W.
  • Elevation = 4205 m (13,800 ft) above sea level.
  • The CfA SMA Time Allocation Committee (TAC) solicits proposals for observations in the 230, 345, 400, and 690 GHz bands for the period 16 November 2009 to 15 May 2010. The deadline for submitting proposals is 17 March 2009 (16:00 EST = 10:00 HST).
• SMT - The Submillimeter Telescope is based at the Mount Graham International Observatory near Safford, Arizona, USA. At the SMT observations can be made from 2.0 mm down to 0.3 mm with PI instruments.
• SOFIA - The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy is a NASA partnership with the German Space Agency (DLR) to develop a Boeing 747SP airliner fitted with a 2.5-meter reflecting telescope. SOFIA will be the largest airborne observatory in the world and will begin flight testing in the second half of 2009.
• SOAR - The Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope is a 4.1 m diameter alt-az optical telescope constructed by a consortium of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, the National Optical Observatories, the University of North Carolina and Michigan State University. It is located at Cerro Pachon, in Chile, and was designed to work from the atmospheric cut-off in the blue (320 nm) to the near infrared, to have excellent image quality (0.22 arcseconds), fast slewing and to have up to nine instruments mounted ready for use. Its primary mirror is only 10 cm thick and is supported by 120 eletro-mechanical actuators, to set and hold its optimum shape. The tertiary mirror will partially correct the atmospheric turbulence by tip-tilting at 50 Hz.
• Tidbinbilla - The radio telescopes at Tidbinbilla are operated by the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, part of NASA's Deep Space Network. As part of the Host Country agreement with NASA, a fraction of the time on the Tidbinbilla DSS-43 70-m and DSS-34 34-m antennas is available to the Australian astronomical community. Since January 2003, the Australia Telescope National Facility has accepted applications for service observations with the 70-m antenna. From the 2007APRS semester onwards, single-dish applications for the DSS-34 34-m antenna have also been accepted. The Tidbinbilla 70-m 34-m antennas are also used together with the Long Baseline Array and other radio telescopes for Very Long Baseline Interferometry.
• UKIRT - United Kingdom Infra-Red Telescope on Mauna Kea
• VLA - The Very Large Array, one of the world's premier astronomical radio observatories, consists of 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. Each antenna is 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter. The data from the antennas are combined electronically to give the resolution of an antenna 36km (22 miles) across, with the sensitivity of a dish 130 meters (422 feet) in diameter.
  • Coordinates: latitude = 34°04'43.497" N, longitude = 107°37'03.819" W.
  • Elevation = 2124 m (6970 ft) above sea level.
• VLT - Very Large Telescope
• WSRT - The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope is a 14-element interferometer on an east-west axis, located close to the Dutch town of Westerbork. It can observe a number of bands between 260 cm and 3.6 cm.
  • Coordinates: latitude = 52°49'60" N, longitude = 6°22'0" E.
  • Elevation = 9 m (32 ft) above sea level.

Last updated on 17 August 2009. Please send any comments or inaccuracies to Dave Lommen.
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