On 9 April, McDonald Observatory in West Texas celebrated the reopening of its 10 m Hobby–Eberly Telescope (HET) after a roughly three-year shutdown for upgrades and the installation of $40 million in instruments.
The telescope is located at an altitude of 2030 m on former mountain ranchlands some 300 km southeast of El Paso. Its primary mirror, made up of 91 hexagonal segments, is at a fixed angle and can rotate to access 70% of the visible sky. With its wide, 22-arcminute field of view, the HET is well-suited for carrying out surveys and hunting for planets.
In its new incarnation, the 20-year-old telescope hosts the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF), a low-resolution spectrograph for capturing data from weak sources over wide swaths of sky, and a high-resolution spectrograph for brighter sources. Campaigns to study dark energy and to search for potentially habitable...
