United Kingdom Infrared Telescope - History

History

Related telescopes on Tenerife, it is a Cassegrain device with a thin primary mirror, around 2/3 thinner than in other contemporary devices and weighing only 6.5 tonnes. The mirror is held in a massive steel 'cell' of 20 tonnes which is linked to the supports by Serrurier trusses. The instrument is held and pointed by a massive 'English Equatorial mounting' or yoke which sits on ball-bearings on steel piers, swinging east-west and rotating around north-south. The geometry of the mount limits the telescopes access to objects between +60 and -40 degrees of declination but it is extremely sturdy and free from deformation and so allows very accurate pointing. The telescope was built between 1975 and 1978; the mechanical systems were built by Dunford Hadfields of Sheffield and the optics by Grubb Parsons of Newcastle. Originally known as the Infrared Flux Collector it began operation in October 1979.

With the delivery of the wide-field imager WFCAM in 2004, UKIRT began a revolutionary large-scale sky survey (the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey, UKIDSS). This project takes some 80% of the available telescope time in wide-field mode. Wide-field takes some 60% of the telescope; the other 40% is devoted to operations with the Cassegrain instrumentation. In December 2008 it was announced that the telescope would be moving to wide-field mode full-time .

Since December 13, 2010 UKIRT is operated remotely from Hilo in a minimalist operation mode (no observers present). Most of the time is used by the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey, but some 60+ nights per year are used by Korean institutes.

A UKIRT infrared survey was used to discover a redshift distance record breaking Quasar in 2011. The Quasar could not be seen in visible light, but could in the longer wavelengths observed by UKIRT. UKIRT supported UKIDSS, which provided a big improvement over 2MASS.