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Session 30 - Radio Astronomy, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow - I.
Oral session, Tuesday, June 11
Union Theater,
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) is the largest telescope in the world specifically designed to work in the submm region of the astronomical spectrum. It is operated as a fully common-user facility, with heterodyne and continuum facility instrumentation covering all of the atmospheric windows from 1.3mm to 450\mum. The surface accuracy of the 15m primary is < 25\mum, and the telescope is capable of absolute pointing to 1.5'' rms. The telescope is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of PPARC (UK), NRC (Canada) and ZWO (the Netherlands); telescope time is available to the international community on a peer-review basis.
In this talk I will briefly describe the main features of the telescope itself, and then describe the available instrumentation, including three major new instruments (SCUBA, a bolometer array, RxB3, a 345GHz heterodyne receiver and RxW, a 490/690 GHz heterodyne receiver) which are currently being commissioned (SCUBA) or are close to delivery to the telescope. Future plans for the facility will also be briefly discussed.
