Operations
The WHT is operated by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING), together with the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope and 1.0m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope. Offices and administration are located an hour's drive away in Santa Cruz de La Palma, the island's capital. Funding is provided by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, 65%), the Netherland's Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, 25%) and Spain's Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, 10%) (2008 values). Telescope time is distributed in proportion to this funding, although Spain receives an additional 20% allocation in return for use of the observatory site. Five percent of observing time is further reserved for astronomers of other nationalities. As a competitive research telescope, the WHT is heavily oversubscribed, typically receiving applications for three to four times as much observing time as is actually available.
The vast majority of observations are carried out in visitor mode i.e. with the investigating astronomer physically present at the telescope. A shift to service mode operations (those carried out by observatory staff on behalf of astronomers who do not travel to the telescope) has been considered and rejected on scientific and operational grounds.
Read more about this topic: William Herschel Telescope
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