The McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope is a 1.6-m f/54 solar telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, USA. It was built in 1962, and is still the largest telescope of its kind in the world. It is named for astronomers Robert McMath and Keith Pierce. At the dedication in 1962, Dr. Waterman read a letter[1] from President Kennedy starting with:
The telescope contains a heliostat at the top of its main tower which focuses the sun's light down a long shaft. The distinctive diagonal shaft continues underground, where the telescope's prime focus is located. The resolution of this main telescope is 2.50 arcsec/mm.
In addition to this 1.6-meter primary mirror, there are also an East- and West-auxiliary telescope which are completely independent of the main telescope. These two auxiliary telescopes both have an 0.91-meter heliostat which are located besides the main heliostat. These auxiliary telescopes have a lightly shorter focal length and f-numbers of 50 and 44. The resolution of the auxiliary telescopes is 5.11 arcsec/mm and 5.75 arcsec/mm.
Instruments
The top of the tower.
The third mirror of the main telescope which sends the light down into the observing room can be moved above three different positions. Two of these have a vacuum spectrograph beneath them, one of 18 meter deep and the other 4 meter deep with lower resolution but higher light throughput. These two spectrographs are able to rotate to compensate for the rotation of the image caused by the use of a heliostat. The third position can only be equipped with a static optical table with no image rotation correction and is therefore rarely used.
A notification of 1992 rededication of the telescope.
The auxiliary telescopes can only be used for imaging on static optical tables and do not provide image rotation correction.
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