The GTC facility instruments: a status review

Rodriguez Espinosa, J. M.; Alvarez Martin, Pedro
Bibliographical reference

Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy II. Edited by McLean, Ian S.; Casali, Mark M. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 7014, pp. 701408-701408-10 (2008).

Advertised on:
8
2008
Number of authors
2
IAC number of authors
2
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) 10.4m telescope received its First Light on July 13, 2007. At present the GTC is undergoing commissioning tests. Night time observations are being carried out routinely from Monday through to Thursday every week. The GTC will begin science observation by the end of the year, and will be offered to the community in September 2008 for the semester starting in March 09. The two first generation science instruments are getting ready to be mounted on the telescope. In this talk I will go through the main features of the first generation science instruments and describe their status of completion. I will also devote some time to the second-generation instruments that are currently at various states of advancement. These include EMIR, a wide field multi-object K band cryogenic spectrograph, and FRIDA, which is a near IR Adaptive Optics fed integral field spectrograph. Finally, I will describe a set of smaller instruments that will complement and indeed extend the observing capabilities of the GTC soon after the start of science operation.
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