Features
The Shane telescope is really three telescopes in one. It can be used in wide field prime focus, coudé focus for high precision spectroscopy, or the intermediate cassegrain focus.
In the Shane dome there is a laser, whose light is sometimes visible with the naked eye, that the observatory beams from the Shane telescope into the night sky. The laser is part of the Lick Adaptive Optics (LAO) program, a joint project of the Lick Observatory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LAO corrects for atmospheric turbulence either by using a natural guide star or by creating a sodium laser guide star, and using the observed motion of the guide star to direct distortion of a deformable mirror hundreds of times each second. The system produces images that are nearly equivalent to those obtained from space-based telescopes. Adaptive optics using natural guide stars has been in development since 1996, and using laser guide stars since 2001. Similar laser adaptive optics systems based on LAO have been installed on the University of California's two Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
Read more about this topic: C. Donald Shane Telescope
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