Ministry of Science & Technology:
- A new telescope facility atop a mountain in the Himalayan range will now keep a watch on the overhead sky to identify transient or variable objects such as supernovae, gravitational lenses, space debris, and asteroids.
- The telescope, commissioned at Devasthal, a hill in Uttarakhand, will help in surveying the sky making it possible to observe several galaxies and other astronomical sources just by staring at the strip of sky that passes overhead.
- It is the first liquid mirror telescope in the country and the largest in Asia.
- Built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, the novel instrument employs a 4-meter-diameter rotating mirror made up of a thin film of liquid mercury to collect and focus light.
- It is located at an altitude of 2450 metres at the Devasthal Observatory campus of Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India in Nainital district, Uttarakhand.
- The scientists from the three countries spun a pool of mercury which is a reflective liquid, so that the surface curved into a parabolic shape which is ideal for focusing light. A thin transparent film of mylar protects the mercury from wind. The reflected light passes through a sophisticated multi-lens optical corrector that produces sharp images over a wide field of view.
- A large-format electronic camera located at the focus records the images. Prof. Paul Hickson (University of British Columbia, Canada), an expert on liquid mirror technology, said that “the rotation of the earth causes the images to drift across the camera, but this motion is compensated electronically by the camera. This mode of operation increases observing efficiency and makes the telescope particularly sensitive to faint and diffuse objects.”
Read more:
https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1830501