The Middlebury College Observatory dome, located atop McCardell Bicentennial Hall on the Middlebury campus, houses a 24-inch (0.6-meter) aperture, f/8 Ritchie-Chrétien reflecting telescope, manufactured by DFM Engineering of Longmont, Colorado.
The telescope is equipped with a 1024x1024-pixel CCD camera for direct imaging, and with a pair of spectrographs for studying the spectra of celestial objects: a low-dispersion slit spectrograph is mounted directly on the telescope, and a fiber-fed spectrograph pipes light from the telescope through an optical fiber to a bench spectrograph in a laboratory near the dome.
The telescope and instrumentation were funded in part with grants from the National Science Foundation and from the Kresge Foundation. The telescope was installed in February 2001. To view pictures of the installation of the 24-inch telescope, click here.
Equipment on the 24-inch, including the fiber leading to the bench
spectrograph in the top right and the low-dispersion slit spectrograph in the bottom right
Looking through the view
finder on the 24-inch