The Galileo Italian National Telescope and Its Instrumentation

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the present status of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), whose initial characteristics were derived from those of the ESO NTT (Barbieri et al., 1994). Its site is the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, in the Canary Island of La Palma, on the West side of the mountain, at an altitude of about 2360 m. Construction and erection activities, started in 1993, are nearing completion. The telescope structure has been installed inside the rotating dome. The three main mirrors have also been transported to the mountain and aluminized in the WHT plant. They will shortly be installed in the telescope.

Two major subsystems have just been completed in Italy and shipped to the mountain, namely the M2 and M3 units, plus the two Rotator Adapters for the Nasmyth foci.

First-light instruments are also being built. Arm A of the telescope is reserved for the imaging section, composed of a visual camera, a near-IR camera, and a common adaptive optics module. On the other arm (arm B), a faint object spectrograph with a long slit, an atmospheric dispersion corrector, and multiobject and imaging capabilities will be mounted. A fixed high-resolution spectrograph with optical derotation is also being designed. Attention is given to the archive of the data.

The TNG Home Page in the Web is available at: http://www.pd.astro.it/TNG/TNG.html