Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) is an optical/infrared reflector telescope near summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, at around 4100 m elevation operated by the National Research Council of Canada, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France and the University of Hawaii. It began operation in 1979. Instruments include:

• MegaCam aka MegaPrime - 1deg × 1deg imager, 0.18 arcsecond pixels.
• WIRCam "Wide-field Infrared Camera" - 20'×20', 0.3 arcsec pixels, near infrared.
• ESPaDOnS - spectroscope (Echelle SpectroPolarimetric Device for the Observation of Stars).
• SITELLE - imaging Fourier transform spectrometer (Spectromètre Imageur à Transformée de Fourier pour l'Etude en Long et en Large de raies d'Emission).
• SPIRou - Near-infrared spectropolarimeter.

Previously listed instruments:

• PUEO/KIR - NIR camera with adaptive optics system.
• CFH12k - 12k×8k CCD mosaic camera.

The term NGCFHT (for "next generation CFHT") and similar terms have been used for an eventual successor to the CFHT at exactly the same location, a modern telescope with more research value. The last two decades have produced a number of concepts, including some for a 10 m class instrument, one recent concept termed the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE). Such a replacement, which optimistically would occur during the 2020s, would require an outage of multiple years.