Leighton telescope

The Leighton telescopes are eight telescopes designed by Robert Leighton and built in the 1970s and 1980s, for millimeter/submillimeter astronomy, They are 10.4-meter parabolic dishes with the high surface accuracy necessary for wavelengths on the order of a millimeter. Initial use:

• Six formed the OVRO Millimeter Array, an interferometer at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO).
• One is the RRI 10.4 m Telescope at the Raman Research Institute, India.
• One was the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

The six OVRO Millimeter Array dishes were later used as part of Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA); one of these is currently used for COMAP and I believe plans are to use one as part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). (Possibly one or more were previously used in early EHT observations.) The CSO is decommissioned, and plans are underway to relocate it to the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile, as the Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT).

The CSO was officially named the Leighton Telescope in 1997, in honor of its designer, Robert Leighton. However, it has still been commonly known as the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO).