Telescopes & Instruments

The Wise Observatory is equipped with a Boller and Chivens telescope, which is a wide field Ritchey-Chretien Reflector mounted on a rigid, off-axis equatorial mount.

The optics is a Mount Wilson/Palomar Observatories design, consisting of

• a 40 inch diameter clear aperture f/4 primary mirror,

• a 20.1 inch diameter f/7 Cassegrain secondary mirror, and

• a corrector quartz lens located 4 inches above the surface of the primary mirror.

This setup provides a field of up to 2.5 degrees in diameter with very little distortion.

A f/13.5 secondary mirror is also available. The secondary mirror can be slightly inclined with a stepping motor.

The present most frequently used observing instruments are:

• Several CCD direct imaging Cameras

• The Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera - FOSC (for spectroscopy, polarimetry, and very rarely for imaging).

• LAIWO - Large Area Imager at Wise Observatory

• eShel - R10000 echelle fiber-fed spectrograph

Each one of them can be mounted at the f/7 focus of the telescope.

The FOSC is a general purpose instrument that permits imaging of a 17' diameter field through different filters and rapid change to an operation mode of spectroscopy of point-like or extended objects, within a few minutes and without refocusing the instrument. The FOSC is patterned after the EFOSC instrument built by ESO, but realized on a "shoestring" budget.