The ESO 1.52m Telescope

Welcome to La Silla and the ESO 1.52-m Telescope. The telescope is an ESO facility but was decommissioned at the end of 2002.
It was last operated by ESO and under control of the 2p2 Telescope Team. The time on this telescope was divided between Brasilian national time and ESO time.

Telescope Overview

The telescope is essentially a twin of the 1.5m telescope at the Observatoire de Haute Provence. It is mounted in an English cradle and is used at the f/14.9 Cassegrain (the f/31.4 Coude' is not available any more). The telescope is at a geographical location of 70°44'12"865W 29°15'7"422S and an altitude of 2335 metres.

Optical layout

Ponting Limitations
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Telescope operating manual
At present two instruments are offered at the ESO 1.52m telescope: the B&C spectrograph and FEROS. However FEROS will be moved to the MPG/ESO 2.2-m Telescope at the beginning of Period-70.

B&C Overview

The B&C spectrograph is the last of three spectrographs of this type once in use at La Silla. In particular this is the instrument that until Dec. 1992 was mounted at the ESO/MPI 2.2m telescope although major changes have been applied since then.

It is equipped with a dioptric camera having an efficiency of ~87% between 430nm and 900nm and >78% for wavelengths <430nm.

A major improvement has been the installation of the new CCD#39 , which considerably enhanced the sensitivity of the system. Anyway since October 1999 we are using another detector, CCD#38 , which is basically a twin of the previous one. This means that the global instrument performance is not dimished.
[*] B&C Homepage

FEROS Overview

FEROS is the Fiber fed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph is a fiber-fed bench-mounted prism-crossdispersed echelle spectrograph. It was operated at the ESO 1.52-m telescope at La Silla from the end of 1998 till Sep-2002. In October 2002 it was moved to the MPG/ESO-2.20m telescope.

It works in quasi Littrow mode and in white pupil configuration. For the object and the nearby sky, the complete optical spectrum from 360-920nm is recorded in one exposure with a resolving power of 48,000 by the use of a two-beam, two-slice image slicer. It is the first instrument on La Silla for which a complete automatic on-line data reduction is running, allowing the observer to go back from the mountain ready to write the paper !!

There is nothing to be set in FEROS, therefore there is no set-up form. The only information you have to notify to the 2p2team is which side of the pier you need the telescope. You can submit such request using the web-based Remedy interface accessible from here or from the La Silla web page.

[*] Old FEROS Homepage

2p2-m Telescope

The ESO 1.52m Telescope