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-meter 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.