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The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET, originally to be named the Spectroscopic Survey Telescope, SST) is a 10-meter reflector telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas that began operation in 1996. It has a segmented mirror consisting of 91 hexagonal mirror segments. Instruments:
Former instruments:
VIRUS was developed for the HETDEX survey, and is an integral field spectrograph consisting of over 150 small spectrographs, each handling over 200 fibers from HET's field of view (FOV).
The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in South Africa is essentially a copy of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, though with some improvements. Both, like Keck Observatory, offer the collecting area and angular resolution of a 10-meter telescope, but at less cost due to two simplifications: their primary mirror is spherical, and their mounting is neither altazimuth nor equatorial, but fixed at a 55-degree tilt (altitude), with aiming only by rotation and timing: this limits observation to a smaller portion of the celestial sphere, and there are more time-constraints upon observing a target-of-interest.