Acquisition and Guidance Box

The arrival of the Acquisition and Guidance (A&G) box is an important event in the steady process of building of the Liverpool Telescope. The box is there to hold the different instruments for measuring the properties of stars and galaxies.

In the close-up picture of the unit (left) you can clearly see the nine circular ports (eight around the side of the unit and one at the bottom) which can each be used to mount an instrument. Light is directed to the correct device by a mirror, which can be rotated to any one of the eight poistions around the side, or moved out of the way to let light to pass through to the instrument at the bottom.

You may notice that there are also eight rectangular holes beneath the instrument ports. These are for the autoguider, which is used to fix the telescope on a particular star in the sky. The Autoguider can be mounted at any one of these eight rectagular holes.

In the second picture (right) you can see how the unit is connected to the mirror cell in the testing jig. It is mounted on an instrument rotator, which is in turn connected to the mirror cell. The instrument rotator is used to rotate the instrument to match the change in the positions of stars. See here for more details.

This picture gives you a pretty good idea of the scale of the finished telescope. It's fairly large!