Hobby-Eberly Telescope

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET, originally to be named the Spectroscopic Survey Telescope, SST) is a 10-meter reflector telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas that began operation in 1996. It has a segmented mirror consisting of 91 hexagonal mirror segments. Instruments:

• LRS2 - "low resolution spectrograph".
• VIRUS - "visible integral-field replicable unit spectrograph".
• HPF - "habitable-zone planet finder".
• HRS-2 - "high resolution spectrograph 2" (in development).

Former instruments:

• HRS - "high resolution spectrograph".
• MRS - "medium resolution spectrograph".
• LRS - "low resolution spectrograph".

Its instruments are used for the HETDEX survey, i.e., Hobby-Everly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment.

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) was originally planned to be a copy of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and does have the same spherical primary mirror but also includes some significant changes.