Toulouse: Paul Sabatier University uses a new telescope installed at the Pic du Midi
At the Pic du Midi, a new ultramodern telescope dedicated mainly to university training made its first observations at the end of 2021.
Certainly, it is not the James Webb telescope, launched successfully on December 25, 2021 and capable of looking at the light of the first stars which formed shortly after the big bang, but a new telescope dedicated to university training which is now in service at the Pic du Midi (Hautes-Pyrénées).
The operation is piloted from Toulouse by the Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier University. “It is a brand new, ultramodern 50 cm telescope, which saw its first light on the night of December 15 to 16, 2021, indicates the university’s communication department.
This instrument, accessible to associations of amateur astronomers, has also strengthened professional and amateur partnerships in monitoring transient events in the starry sky”.
“A wide field of view”
Before this new installation, the university community had to make do with an old device “60 cm long and 110 years old with a shaky frame”, specifies UT3. And to specify:
“It is now a thing of the past, the old telescope has gone to join the museum space of the Pic du Midi. Despite a diameter slightly smaller than that of its predecessor, the new telescope already displays superior performance in terms of the quality of its optics and its mechanics. The optical tube, based on the so-called Corrected Dall-Kirkham configuration, was made by the Californian company PlaneWave while the equatorial mount was made by the French company Alcor System”.
The company also installed the telescope at the top of the Pic du Midi”. According to the university, thanks to its short focal length, this telescope benefits from a large field of view which allows the observation of large and low-contrast objects, such as galaxies close to the Milky Way and a contribution to the monitoring of phenomena. transients, such as the photometric tracking of stars with a known planetary system.