The Multi-Telescope Telescope Project: An Inexpensive Spectroscopic Facility

Abstract

AbstractWe have constructed a new facility at the Georgia State University Hard Labor Creek Observatory, consisting of a telescope and a fiber-fed spectrograph and detector. The Multi-Telescope Telescope (MTT) is an inexpensive one-meter light-collecting telescope whose ‘primary’ mirror consists of nine 33.3 cm mirrors. Each mirror of the MTT focuses light into a separate optical fiber, thus avoiding light losses of conventional fiber bundles. The optical fibers feed a modified ‘slightly’ off-plane Ebert-Fastie spectrograph. The detector is a CCD with low thermal noise characteristics, cooled to 200 K. The CHARA spectroscopic facility will be used for high precision radial velocity observations of binary orbits, tomographic separation of binary spectra, and observations of nonradial pulsations of Be stars.