C. Donald Shane telescope

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The C. Donald Shane telescope is a 3 meter (approximately 120 inch) Reflecting telescope located at Lick Observatory in California. It is named for astronomer C. Donald Shane, who led the effort to acquire the necessary funds from the California Legislature, and who then oversaw the telescope's construction. It is the largest and most powerful telescope at Lick.

[edit] Features

The Shane telescope is really three telescopes in one. It can be used in wide field prime focus, coudé focus for high precision spectroscopy, or the intermediate cassegrain focus.

In the largest dome on the mountain is a laser, sometimes visible with the naked eye, that the observatory beams from the Shane telescope into the night sky. The laser is part of the Lick Adaptive Optics (LAO) program. LAO corrects for atmospheric turbulence by distorting the primary mirror hundreds of times each second, and nearly produces results that were, at one time, only available from space-based telescopes. Once out of development, LAO will be installed on both Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

[edit] History

After 55 years of operation, the astronomers at Lick relied on two telescopes built in the 19th century. Once considered giants in the field, these telescopes were then very much out of date, and Lick astronomers were finding it more and more difficult to compete with the newer observatories around the world. It took 15 years to design and build what was, at the time, the second largest reflecting telescope in the world.