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Published January 30, 2003 | Published
Book Section - Chapter Open

CELT site testing program

Abstract

The California Extremely Large Telescope, CELT, is a proposed 30-m telescope. Choosing the best possible site for CELT is essential in order to extract the best science from the observations and to reduce the complexity of the telescope. Site selection is therefore currently one of the most critical pacing items of the CELT project. In this paper, we first present selected results from a survey of the atmospheric transparency at optical and infrared wavelengths over the southwestern USA and northern Mexico using satellite data. Results of a similar study of South America have been reported elsewhere. These studies will serve as the pre-selection criterion of the sites at which we will perform on-site testing. We then describe the current status of on-site turbulence evaluation efforts and the future plans of the CELT site testing program.

Additional Information

© 2003 Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). The CELT site selection project has benefited greatly from our collaboration with the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope (GSMT) site selection group of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), in particular with Alistair Walker, Robert Blum, Hugo Schwarz, and Andrei Tokovinin. We also thank Marc Sarazin from European Southern Observatory (ESO) for many useful discussions. This work has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics, managed by the University of California at Santa Cruz under cooperative agreement No. AST-9876783.

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