The Liverpool Telescope

For more information, please visit: https://telescope.ljmu.ac.uk/.

Liverpool Telescope. Image credit: Daniél Lopez

The Liverpool Telescope is a fully robotic astronomical telescope owned and operated by the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores.

It was designed and built by Telescope Technologies Limited (a spin-off company of the university) as the prototype of their production-line range of two-metre class telescopes. It's sited at the international Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the summit of the island of La Palma, westernmost of the Canaries, some 200 km off the coast of north-west Africa.

The telescope is a two-metre Cassegrain reflector, with Ritchey-Chrétien hyperbolic optics, on an alt-azimuth mount. Up to nine different instruments can be mounted at the Cassegrain focus, one in the "straight through" position and eight more on side ports accessible by a rotating "science fold" tertiary mirror. Over the years a wide variety of optical and near-IR imagers, spectrometers, and polarimeters have been mounted on the LT.

The LT concentrates on meeting specific scientific goals:

  • Rapid robotic reaction to unpredictable phenomena and their systematic follow-up
  • Small scale surveys and serendipitous source follow-up
  • Monitoring of variable objects on all timescales from seconds to years
  • Simultaneous coordinated observations with other ground and space-based facilities

Available instrumentation

Name Type Pixel size Field of view Overhead per exposure Filters/Resolution
IO:O Optical imager 0.15 arcsec/pixel 10 x 10 arcmin 13.5s ugrizBV + narrow band filters
RISE Fast optical imager 0.54 arcsec/pixel 9.2x9.2 arcmin 0.035s B+V
SPRAT Low resolution spectrograph 0.44 arcsec/pixel Acquisition: 7.5x1.9 arcmin. Spectrum: 1.8x95 arcsec slit 10s R=350 at center of 4020-8100 Angstroms
MOPTOP Fast polarimeter 0.20 arcsec/pixel 7x7 arcmin NA MOP-B, MOP-V, MOP-R, MOP-I, MOP-L
LIRIC Infrared imager 0.29 arcsec/pixel 3.0x2.5 arcmin ~20 microsec J, H

Acknowledgements

The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.