Keck Ii is a large scientific research facility located in the US state of California. The site was designed and built by the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The facility is named after its benefactor, William Keck.
The Keck Ii research site comprises two identical twin 10-meter (33 ft) telescopes known as “Keck North” and “Keck South”. These telescopes are among the largest optical and infrared telescopes in operation today. Each telescope has a primary mirror made up of 36 hexagonal segments that work together to provide a collecting area of 928 square meters (10,000 sq ft). This gives Keck Ii a total light-gathering power that is about four times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Keck Ii facility also houses a number of other scientific instruments including spectrographs, imagers, and high-speed cameras. These instruments allow astronomers to study objects in our Solar System as well as stars and galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. In addition, Keck Ii is home to an adaptive optics system which corrects for the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere on astronomical images. This system provides Keck Ii with some of the sharpest images ever taken from the ground-based telescope.
Some notable discoveries made using Keck Ii include:
•The first direct evidence for extrasolar planets orbiting another star similar to our Sun;
•The most distant galaxy yet seen in optical light;
•A giant filament of dark matter connecting two clusters of galaxies;
•And many more…