The Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope or JKT is a 1m optical telescope named for the Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Funded jointly by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom with planning throughout the 1970s, construction of the JKT was completed in 1983 with the first photographic plate taken in March 1984. It can be used with two different focal points and different instruments, although by 1998 this was refined to one CCD imaging instrument. The telescope weighs nearly 40 metric tons, in total, according to JKT documentation from the Isaac Newton Group website.
Now superseded by more recent and larger telescopes it was taken out of service as a common-user facility as of August 2003.
Famous quotes containing the word telescope:
“The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)