{"id":28,"date":"2015-03-11T15:05:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-11T15:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/physics.uncg.edu\/new\/tco\/?page_id=28"},"modified":"2025-02-05T15:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T15:37:11","slug":"telescope-building","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/physics.uncg.edu\/tco\/tco\/telescope-building\/","title":{"rendered":"Telescope & Building"},"content":{"rendered":"

The telescope at the Three College Observatory is a Cassegrain reflecting telescope. The mirror diameter is 0.81 meters (32 inches). This characteristic of a telescope is perhaps the most important factor in determining the telescope’s effectiveness as a research instrument since it determines the amount of light it can collect, and hence the effectiveness of the telescope in detecting very dim or very distant objects.<\/p>\n

The telescope at the Three College Observatory can collect approximately 26,000 times as much light as the human eye.<\/p>\n

The telescope is the largest telescope in North Carolina, and one of the largest in the southeastern United States. The only larger telescopes at dark sky locations include the 41-inch Fan Mountain telescope operated by the University of Virginia, and the 36-inch telescope operated by the University of Florida.<\/p>\n

The f\/13.5 telescope was constructed in 1979 by Sigma Research, Inc., of Richland, WA and installed at the Three College Observatory in May 1981. The fork-mounted equatorial design uses a friction drive for both right ascension and declination axes, and is capable of tracking along both axes. The telescope utilizes a Cer-Vit primary mirror and Ritchey-Chretien optics. The usable photographic field size is 3.75 inches in diameter at a plate scale of 18.8 arc seconds\/mm. The telescope weighs 9000 lbs. and is mounted on a 7 x 8 x 10 foot concrete pier weighing 50 tons.<\/p>\n

The telescope is equipped with an f\/10 6-inch refractive finder telescope (with a 1.3 degree field) designed and built by Duncan Davidson of Seattle, Washington. Instrumentation for the telescope includes a photographic camera utilizing 4 x 5 inch glass plates, an archaic digitized ISIT low light level video camera, an echelle spectrograph, and a state-of-the-art CCD Video Camera.<\/a><\/p>\n

The telescope’s motion and positioning is controlled by the PC-TCS\/DCS DC Servo Motor Telescope Control System from COMSOFT<\/a>, 1552 West Chapala Drive, Tucson, Arizona 85704 (520) 360-2078<\/p>\n

Images of the observatory building and telescope may be found in the following:<\/p>\n