Operations
The WHT is operated by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING), together with the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope and 1.0m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope. Offices and administration are located an hour's drive away in Santa Cruz de La Palma, the island's capital. Funding is provided by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, 65%), the Netherland's Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, 25%) and Spain's Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, 10%) (2008 values). Telescope time is distributed in proportion to this funding, although Spain receives an additional 20% allocation in return for use of the observatory site. Five percent of observing time is further reserved for astronomers of other nationalities. As a competitive research telescope, the WHT is heavily oversubscribed, typically receiving applications for three to four times as much observing time as is actually available.
The vast majority of observations are carried out in visitor mode i.e. with the investigating astronomer physically present at the telescope. A shift to service mode operations (those carried out by observatory staff on behalf of astronomers who do not travel to the telescope) has been considered and rejected on scientific and operational grounds.
Read more about this topic: William Herschel Telescope
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)