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Session 74 - Ground-Based Instruments.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The Hobby-Eberly telescope's (HET) unique optical design makes deliberate trades between science performance and cost. To optimize the use of the telescope we require reliable modeling of the performance in order to efficiently plan observations. We describe the HET optical system design and present a performance model that gives the photon flux in the HET focal plane for sample targets under different seeing conditions. In addition we utilize this model and similar models of a focal plane and fiber spectrograph to estimate the HET limiting magnitudes at anticipated instrument spectral resolutions.
