Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope

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CFHT in the morning.

CFHT at sunset.

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope is located near the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii at an altitude of 4,204 meters (13,793 feet). Operational since 1979^[1], the telescope is a Prime Focus/Cassegrain configuration with a usable aperture diameter of 3.58 meters.

CFHT hosts three state-of-the-art instruments: MegaPrime, a wide-field high resolution CCD mosaic of 36 CCDs and 340 MegaPixels; WIRCam, an infra-red mosaic of 4 detectors and 16 MegaPixels; and ESPaDOnS, a new échelle spectrograph / spectropolarimeter. PUEO, an adaptive optics bonette, is still offered to users, while Gecko, a very high resolution spectrograph, and MOS, the Multi Object Spectrograph, can be used on special resquest only.

CFHT, in collaboration with Edizioni Scientifiche Coelum, maintains a public-outreach website called "Hawaiian Starlight" which offers extremely high-quality versions of CFHT images in various formats including a yearly calendar.

The corporation is bound by a tri-partite agreement between the University of Hawaii and the governments of France and Canada. Additional funding for WIRCam came from Korea and Taiwan.

Currently, CFHT observing time is offered to scientists from Canada, France and the State of Hawaii, its three funding nations. Astronomers from the European Union can also submit proposals through the Opticon Access program. An agreement between the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and CFHT opens the telescope to the Taiwanese astronomical community up to the end of 2010.

When the MegaPrime instrument first went into operation in 2003^[2], the images it produced were sharp in the center but blurry around the edges for reasons which weren't known. The project proceeded to use the camera despite the flaw, until May 2004 when the steering committee decided that the flaw was serious enough to take the time to determine its cause. The camera's field correcting lens set was dismantled and checked out by engineers, and thanks to a fortunate accident it was discovered that placing one of the four lenses backwards in its housing resolved the issue. The underlying cause of this issue was never determined.^[3]