Germany's Kiepenheuer Institut fur Sonnenphysik (KIS), an institute for solar research with ground-based telescopes, has improved its Tenerife-based observatory with an elliptical mirror.
The Institute runs two telescopes on the island of Tenerife, the Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT) which has an aperture of 0.7m, and the Gregor telescope with an aperture of 1.5m. Dirk Soltau is an experimental solar physics scientist with KIS. He said: 'The VTT telescope is equipped with optics supplied by Optical Surfaces in the 1980's. When it came to the replacement of the Gregor tertiary mirror in 2012, Optical Surfaces was again the successful bidder.
Optical Surfaces has supplied a 350mm diameter on-axis ellipsoidal mirror to KIS, which is based in Freiberg, Germany. The new Gregor M3 is an elliptical mirror with two foci that was specified with a particular emphasis on low stray light levels.
