Palomar 5 m Hale Telescope
Palomar 5 m Hale Telescope
The Stony Brook Physics & Astronomy Department is a 6% partner in the
Palomar 5 m
Hale telescope. The Hale telescope offers a full range of imaging
and spectroscopic capabilities from the optical to the mid-infrared,
and is equipped with a natural guide-star adaptive optics system for
high contrast, high angular resolution imaging. Together with
Caltech, JPL, and the AMNH, Stony Brook is also a member of the
Palomar extreme adaptive optics upgrade collaboration. The updated
adaptive optics system,
PALM3000, is expected to
attain unprecedented imaging contrast in the near-infrared and to
allow diffraction-limited imaging with the Hale in the optical.
the SMARTS telescopes
SMARTS telescopes
Stony Brook University is one
of the founding members of the
SMARTS consortium. The SMARTS
consortium was organized to keep open and operating the
small
telescopes at the
Cerro Tololo
Interamerican Observatory. The prime source of information about
SMARTS is the
main SMARTS
web page at Yale university.
Mount Stony Brook
the 14" telescope
The
Mount
Stony Brook Observatory consists of a new computerized Meade 14
inch LX200-ACF telescope permanently mounted in a dome on the roof of
our building. We have 2 CCD cameras (+ filter wheel) and a
spectrograph that can be used with it, as well as an assortment of
eyepieces. The telescope is currently used for graduate and
undergraduate classes and labs and during our
Astronomy
Open Nights. Additionally, a large number of
smaller 8" telescopes are also available for use.
The roof of the ESS building is designed for
moderate sized crows (~50 people), and students in the
introductory undergraduate astronomy courses are frequently
invited up for viewing.
Ground-Based Observatories
Stony Brook astronomers make regular use of the wide array of
instrumentation available to contemporary astronomy. Stony Brook
faculty and graduate students are frequent users of the facilities of
the
National Optical Astronomy
Observatories such as the
Cerro Tololo Interamerican
Observatory, the
National Radio Astronomy Observatories, the NASA
Infrared Telescope Facility
(IRTF) on Mauna Kea, the
Naval Prototype Optical
Interferometer (NPOI), the
Gemini,
Keck, and
IRAM observatories, the
Combined Array for Research
in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA), the
Nobeyama 45m telescope, and the
Subaru telescope.
Space Missions
Stony Brook faculty have been principal investigators on programs
using the
Hubble Space
Telescope (HST), the
Chandra
X-ray Observatory,
XMM-Newton
X-ray Observatory,
Herschel
telescope and the
Spitzer Space Telescope.
Faculty and students routinely use archival data from these and other
NASA missions in the course of their research. Graduate students
routinely participate in analysis of data obtained from these and
other missions, and use these data in the PhD theses.
