The 3.6 meter Devasthal Optical Telescope: From inception to realisation

Abstract

India's largest size 3.6 meter Devashal optical telescope (DOT) was commissioned in the year 2016, though the idea of building it germinated way back in the year 1976. This article provides research accounts as well as glimpses of its nearly four decades of journey. After a decade of site surveys, location of Devasthal in central Himalyan region of Kumaon was identified. Thereafter, a detailed site characterization was conducted and project approvals were obtained. The telescope is designed to be a technologically advanced optical astronomy instrument. It has been demonstrated to resolve a binary star having angular separation of 0.4 arc-sec. After the technical activation of the telescope on March 30, 2016, it has been in regular use for testing various back-end instruments as well as for optical and near-infrared observations of celestial objects. Back-end instruments used for these observations are 4KX4K CCD imager, Faint object imager cum spectrograph and TIFR near-infrared camera-II. A few published science results based on the observations taken with the telescope are also presented. Furthermore, the routine observations find that for a good fraction of observing time the telescope provides sky images of sub-arc-second resolution at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. This indicates that the extreme care taken in the design and construction of the telescope dome building has been rewarding since the as-built thermal mass contributes minimally so as not to degrade the natural atmospheric seeing measured at Devasthal about two decades ago during 1997-1999 using differential image motion monitor. The overall on-site performance of the telescope is found to be excellent and at par with the performance of other similar telescopes located over the globe.

Accepted in Current Science on May 31, 2019; Figures 11 and Tables 3

References in corpus (3)

• The night-sky at the Calar Alto Observatory II: The sky at the near infrared
• Scientific capabilities and advantages of the 3.6 meter optical telescope at Devasthal, Uttarakhand
• First-light images from low dispersion spectrograph-cum-imager on 3.6-meter Devasthal Optical Telescope

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Photometric calibrations and characterization of the 4K$\times$4K CCD Imager, the first-light axial port instrument for the 3.6m DOT
• Observations with the 3.6 meter Devasthal Optical Telescope
• Characterisation of Timau National Observatory using limited in-situ measurements
• History of ARIES: A premier research institute in the area of observational sciences
• PAH and nbL Features Detection in Planetary Nebulae NGC 7027 and BD +303639 with TIRCAM2 Instrument on 3.6m DOT
• Optical Observations of star clusters NGC 1513 and NGC 4147; white dwarf WD1145+017 and $K$ band imaging of star forming region Sh2-61 with the 3.6 meter Devasthal Optical Telescope
• Quasar catalogue for the astrometric calibration of the forthcoming ILMT survey
• Pathway to Devasthal Astronomical Observatory, ARIES
• The upcoming 4m ILMT facility and data reduction pipeline testing
• TIRCAM2 Camera Interface on the Side port of the 3.6 meter Devasthal Optical Telescope