UK Schmidt Telescope

Background

The UK Schmidt Telescope, a 1.24-metre Schmidt camera, sits next to the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. It is operated by the Australian Astronomical Observatory and closely resembles the Samuel Oschin telescope in California.

The UK originally built and ran the telescope from 1973, and it became part of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in 1988. Australia has operated it entirely since the UK left the AAO in 2010, though the name remains unchanged. Its design follows the Oschin Schmidt Telescope.

This survey telescope captures a 6-degree by 6-degree field of view, originally recorded on 35-centimetre square glass photographic plates. It provided the main optical survey data for the southern sky from the 1970s into the 2000s. The Space Telescope Science Institute digitally scanned its original sky survey plates for the Hubble Space Telescope's Guide Star Catalog and the Digitized Sky Survey. After an hour-long exposure on photographic plates, it can detect objects down to magnitude 21.

Photographic glass and film were largely replaced by electronic CCD detectors in the late 1990s. After 2000, the UKST primarily performed multi-object spectroscopy using the 6-degree Field (6dF) instrument. This instrument uses a robot to place up to 150 optical fibres on a metal plate at the telescope's focal plane, directing light from targets to a spectrograph on the dome floor.

The 6dF Galaxy Survey, a redshift survey of 120,000 infrared-selected galaxies, finished in 2005. From 2003 to 2013, the UKST conducted the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), measuring radial velocities and metallicities for about half a million Milky Way stars. Two new spectroscopic surveys, TAIPAN and Funnelweb, are planned after 2015.