Astrophysics (Index)About

International Liquid Mirror Telescope

(ILMT)
(4-meter liquid mirror telescope under construction in India)

The International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is a 4-meter liquid-mirror reflector telescope at Devasthal Observatory in India, which is in the Himalayan region at an altitude of 2450 meters. First light was achieved in May 2022, preliminary data-collection was carried out in late 2022/early 2023 (during which it discovered the supernova, SN 2023af), formal inauguration took place in March 2023, and I presume it is collecting data. The ILMT takes advantage of the lesser expense of a liquid mirror, forgoing the exacting work and expense required constructing other types of mirrors, trading that off for the limitation of viewing only very close to vertically. ILMT's purpose is specifically for a five-year survey of the strip of the sky that passes through its field of view. I believe data collection is to be continuous, a kind of drift scan collecting data from the successive pixels of the camera pointed at a point in the sky, so the integration time is the amount of time it takes for a point in the sky to pass from one side of the focal-plane CCD to the other. Among the goals are transient detection, light curves, and images of the survey field enhanced through image stacking and sky subtraction.


(telescope,reflector,liquid mirror,visible light,ground,India)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Liquid_Mirror_Telescope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devasthal_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-mirror_telescope
https://www.aries.res.in/facilities/astronomical-telescopes/ilmt
http://www.ilmt.ulg.ac.be/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.476.2075K/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ASPC..238...97P/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022JAI....1140003K/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022JApA...43...10K/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022JAI....1140001D/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024BSRSL..93..895S/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024BSRSL..93.1054S/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024BSRSL..93..880K/abstract

Referenced by page:
liquid mirror telescope

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