Paper
29 September 2004 Optomechanical design of the Discovery Channel Telescope prime focus assembly
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT) is a 4.2m aperture telescope with a unique front end pod assembly that incorporates a secondary mirror assembly on one end, and a prime focus corrector group with focal plane instrument on the other. By flipping the pod end-for-end, the DCT is quickly converted from an f/6.13 Ritchey-Chretien telescope with a 21 arcminute field of view, to an f/1.9 two degree wide field prime focus camera. This paper describes the conceptual opto-mechanical design and performance assessment of the Prime Focus Assembly (PFA), including the pod interfaces, structures, optic mounts and the functions and configurations of the various mechanisms within the pod.
© (2004) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Charles Delp, Michael A. Duffy, Douglas Neill, and Thomas A. Sebring "Optomechanical design of the Discovery Channel Telescope prime focus assembly", Proc. SPIE 5495, Astronomical Structures and Mechanisms Technology, (29 September 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.551728
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CITATIONS
Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Telescopes

Interfaces

Mirrors

Camera shutters

Finite element methods

Optical filters

Optical instrument design

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