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Dr. Jeff Hall
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Dr. Jeff Hall Astronomer, Director, Lowell Observatory
TRANSCRIPT:
The DCT is a 4.3-meter telescope, meaning the mirror, the primary mirror, is about 14 feet across -- substantially larger than our current largest facility. It is almost done. All of the major components are on site and assembled. The only component as of this interview that we have still to put in the telescope is the secondary mirror. Once that is in, we will be testing the full optical system in the early part of 2012, leading up to first light in the middle of next year.
First light is the declaration of victory for the construction of the telescope, the first image through the full optical system. Now at that point, we're not done. For a facility like this, you don't flip the switch and off you go. There will be a long period of what we call "commissioning," which is working out the bugs and the kinks that are in any kind of complicated hardware and software system like this.
But what you hope to see over 2012 and 2013 is a gradually decreasing level of debugging, and a gradually increasing level of astronomers out there using it for what it was designed to do.
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