Liverpool Telescope - First Images

The mounted Camera Here you can see the CCD camera mounted onto the A&G box together with its cooling system.

On Tuesday 1st May, the Liverpool Telescope took a big step forward when the CCD camera was mounted on the telescope and images of the night sky taken for the first time.

The observations were taken from the TTL factory in Birkenhead through the specially designed roof aperture. This was part of the important testing phase of the telescope where all the systems are brought together for the first time.

The first image taken is shown below. Since this is the very first image, the telescope is out of focus, turning a star into the fuzzy ring you can see here. The second image next to it is the same star but after the telescope was focused.

The first images from the Liverpool Telescope On the left is the first image, showing an out-of-focus star. On the right, you can see the star after the telescope was focused.

The Instrument team at work Examining the images from the telescope in the factory.

You may wonder what the strange streaks and lines on the images are. Normally the CCD chip is cooled down to -110 °C, but for these tests, it was run at a higher temperature (-30 °C) which causes some groups of pixels to produce these effects.

One measurement that can be made from these images is the atmospheric seeing which blurs the star. In fact, the seeing makes the star less than 3 arcseconds across. This is very good for the centre of a city, but much worse than on good astronomical sites like La Palma.