Equipment
The observatory operates a one-metre diameter Boller and Chivens telescope, which is a wide field Ritchey-Chrétien reflector mounted on a rigid, off-axis equatorial mount. This telescope was originally a twin of the Las Campanas 1 m Swope telescope, which was described by Bowen and Vaughan (1973), though the two instruments diverged somewhat during the years. It also has two CCD cameras, a two-star "Nather-type" photometer, a "Faint-object spectrograph-camera" (FOSC), and an older Boller and Chivens spectrograph. The photoelectric photometer and the Boller and Chivens spectrograph have not been in use for more than a decade.
A dioptric focal reducer (Maala) was used at f/7 to project a field of view almost one-degree wide on one of the CCDs (a SITe 2048x4096 pixel array) at the cost of slightly larger than optimal PSF sampling and some edge-of-field distortions. However, this instrument never produced satisfactory images and its use was discontinued.
One new CCD camera entered regular use in 2006: it is a Princeton Instruments Versarray with 1340×1300 pixels each 20 µm wide, with a peak quantum efficiency of 95% and good response in the blue part of the spectrum. Another camera was operated from the end of 2007; this is a CCD mosaic covering a one-degree non-contiguous field of view at f/7 in a single exposure (the LAIWO=Large Array Imager of the Wise Observatory camera). This camera is composed of four 4096x4096 pixel non-butted Fairchild CCDs that are thick and front-illuminated, thus have a response peaking in the red with approximately 42% quantum efficiency. A smaller CCD with very high quantum efficiency and fast readout, centered between the four large CCDs, is used for guiding and fast photometry of selected objects. LAIWO is a cooperative endeavour of the Wise Observatory (PI: T. Mazeh) with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy Heidelberg (PI: T. Henning).
A 46-cm prime-focus computer-controlled telescope was added to the Wise Observatory in 2004 mainly for minor planet CCD photometry purposes and funded by the Israel Space Agency as part of a National Knowledge Center on Near Earth Objects. This is a Centurion-18 that has been extensively modified by the observatory staff in a continuous effort to transform it into a robotic telescope. The telescope was originally equipped with a thermoelectrically-cooled SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera with 2184x1472 pixels each 6.8 micrometres wide, each subtending slightly more than one arcsec at the telescope prime focus. Since early-2009 this CCD was replaced by an SBIG STL-6303 CCD with 2048x3072 pixels each 9 micrometers wide. The telescope and its camera, including the telescope dome, can be remotely-operated.
The observatory also operates a CONCAM all-sky CCD camera to monitor bright transient sources, and a Hungarian Automatic Telescope (HAT).
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