Subaru Telescope
The Subaru Telescope is a 8.2-meter optical and near-infrared telescope located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii, USA. The telescope is named after the Japanese car manufacturer Subaru, which donated US$10 million towards its construction. Its scientific goals are to search for and characterize extra-solar planets, study star formation and evolution, investigate active galaxies, and survey the large-scale structure of the Universe.
Construction of the Subaru Telescope began in 1997 and was completed in 1999. The telescope cost a total of US$97 million to build; this includes both construction costs and costs for instrumentation and site development. The Subaru Telescope saw first light on October 12th, 1999.
The primary mirror of the Subaru Telescope is 8.2 meters in diameter; it is one of the largest mirrors ever used on a ground-based telescope. The secondary mirror is 1 meter in diameter; it is suspended above the primary by a system of struts known as a spider support (hence the nickname “spider”). The tertiary mirror is 0.4 meters in diameter; it reflects light back down through a hole in the center of the secondary mirror to an instrument chamber below.
There are three main instruments installed on the Subaru Telescope: FOCAS (Fiber Optic Coupled Adaptive Optics System), HSC (Hyper Suprime-Cam), and SCExAO (Subaru Coronagraphic Exoplanet Survey Instrument). FOCAS is a spectrograph that can be used with either an imaging camera or an integral field unit; HSC is an ultra-wide field imager with 100 times the field of view of traditional cameras; SCExAO is an extreme adaptive optics system that provides high contrast imaging capabilities for directly detecting exoplanets around nearby stars.
Subaru also has several other smaller instruments installed, including AO188 (Subaru Adaptive Optics Demonstrator), CIAO (Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics), COMICS (COoled Mid-Infrared Camera & Spectrometer), FMOScopeS1&2(Fibre Multi Object Spectrograph Scopes 1 & 2 ), MOIRCS/MCS(Multi Object InfraRed Camera & Spectrograph / Multi Colour Simultaneous camera), SAC/SXD(Suprime Cam Auxiliary CCD / Suprime Cam X ray Detectors)and VISTA/VIRCAM(VISible Imaging System for Astronomy / Visible Wavelength IR Array Camera).