The Galileo Italian National Telescope and Its Instrumentation

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the present status of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), a 3.5 m, active-optics telescope for the Italian community, whose initial characteristics were derived from those of the ESO NTT. For a more detailed description see e.g. in Barbieri et al. (1994). Its site is the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, in the Canary Island of La Palma, on the West side of the mountain, at an altitude of about 2360 m. Construction and erection activities, started in 1993, are nearing completion. The telescope structure has been installed inside the rotating dome. The three main mirrors have also been transported to the mountain and aluminized in the WHT plant. They will shortly be installed in the telescope. Three major subsystems still undergo intensive activity in Italy, namely testing of the M2 and M3 units, testing of the operational version of the control hardware and software, and construction of the two rotator adapters for the Nasmyth foci. First light instruments are also being built. Arm A of the telescope is reserved for the imaging section, composed by a visual camera, a near-IR camera, plus a common adaptive optics module. On the other arm B, a faint object spectrograph with long slit, atmospheric dispersion corrector, multiobject and imaging capabilities, will be mounted. A fixed high resolution spectrograph with optical derotation is also being designed. Attention has already been given to the archive of the data. It is planned to have first light before the end of 1996, and to start regular scientific operations after an adequate period of debugging and commissioning.