The main users are the CFHT scientists from Canada, France, and Hawaii. Collaborative arrangements also offer access to the telescope, astronomers from Taiwan, Brazil and China. At first, astronomers came to Hawaii to make their own observations today, the staff of CFHT observations is responsible for all users. They provide maximum use of the telescope observing a given program (fashion queue).
CFHT is now operated remotely from Waimea by a single observer. Education is one of the important missions of the observatory. Of stargazing sessions for the general public are organized, CFHT is a wonderful educational tool for science and astronomy. In the early years, 80 pictures were taken with photographic plates, quickly replaced by CCDs, today, the detectors used are digital cameras. MegaCam detectors, covering a field of 1 degree by 1 degree in the sky, with an excellent image resolution, the quality of the sky above Mauna Kea. MegaCam WIRCam and cover a wide range of studies, near-Earth asteroids in the vicinity of our solar system, to distant galaxies. CFHT contributes to a better understanding of dark matter or dark energy, or the Milky Way.
The observations in the near-infrared light complement those made in visible light.
|Dimensions du CFHT||Characteristics|
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|Total mass of the telescope||325 tons|
|Mass of the mobile section||250 tons|
|Mirror mass||14 tons|
|Mirror focal length||13.5 m|
|Dome mass||580 tons|
|Dome diameter||32 m|
|Total height of the building||38 m|
Image: The observatory hostes a CFHT optical and infrared telescope of 3.58 meters. The observatory is located on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano 4,204 meters high, located on the island of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
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