Australian Astronomical Observatory - The Schmidt Telescope

The Schmidt Telescope

The 1.2m Schmidt telescope was built to complement the AAT and officially began operations in August 1973. It was designed for survey astronomy, having an extremely large field-of-view which is more than 12 times the apparent diameter of the moon. The telescope was operated by the Schmidt Telescope Unit of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh until 1988, when it was agreed that control would be handed over to the AAO. The Schmidt has undertaken much notable work, including blue and red photographic surveys of the southern sky and the 6dF Galaxy Survey. Its multi-object spectroscopic capability is currently being exploited to perform the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) survey.