The Isaac Newton Telescope or INT is a 2.54 m (100 in.) optical telescope run by the ING at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands since 1984.
Originally it was situated at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, England, which was the site of the Royal Greenwich Observatory after it moved away from Greenwich due to light pollution. It was inaugurated in 1967 by Queen Elizabeth II. The telescope is now one member of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes.
However, Herstmonceux suffered from poor weather, and the advent of mass air travel made it plausible for UK astronomers to run an overseas observatory. In 1979, the INT was shipped to La Palma, where it has remained ever since. It saw its second first light in 1984, with a video camera.
Today, it is used mostly with the Wide Field Camera (WFC), a four CCD instrument with a field of view of 0.56x0.56 square degrees which was commissioned in 1997. The other main instrument available at the INT is the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph (IDS), recently re-introduced having been unavailable for a period of several years.
Read more about Isaac Newton Telescope: Technical Details Since 1984, Contemporaries
Famous quotes containing the words newton and/or telescope:
“I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.”
—Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
“The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)