Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope

The Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope has been taken out of service as a common-user facility as of August 2003

The Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) has a parabolic primary mirror of diameter 1.0 m with two interchangeable secondaries. It is equatorially mounted, on a cross-axis mount, which allows operation east or west of the pier. Normally it is east of the pier. There is a choice of two secondary mirrors. The f/8.06 Harmer-Wynne system uses a spherical secondary and a doublet corrector to give a field of 90 arcmin diameter for photographic astrometry over a wide field. The other secondary is a hyperboloid, which gives a conventional f/15 Cassegrain focus. The JKT normally operates in f/15 mode. More information can be found on the JKT Public Information web pages.

The JKT was offered to visiting astronomers with the 2k × 2k SITe2 CCD camera and the JAG autoguiding box (this instrumental configuration is also referred as JAG CCD). The camera provides an unvignetted field of view of 10 × 10 arcmin, with a pixel sampling of 0.33 arcsec.

General JKT Help with JAG-CCD

lpss10 is now the observing system at the JKT. The data taking (UltraDAS); the instrument control (ICS) and data inspection (IRAF) are all on this machine. The ALPHA station lpas1 is running the TCS.

As of March 4, 2002, engineering support is withdrawn from the JKT after 23.00 - so the DE should not be called after that time for technical problems that affect observing. They should still be called in their role of Incident Officer to safeguard people or equipment. In case you need technical help after 23:00, please consult with the INT (tel. 640), or WHT TO (tel. 559).

IMPORTANT:

A Basic User Guide is available to facilitate telescope and instrument operations
An online UltraDAS manual is also available, which contains a very useful command dictionary
The JKT User Manual can be found here: Observers' Guide to JKT JAG-CCD imaging
Instructions for using IRAF to look at your data from the reduction worskstation
The Fault Database must be used to report any fault of the system and record all lost time. Faults are checked every morning at 9:00 h by the Operations Team, so filling in the Fault Database is the best way to have all the problems solved in the shortest time as possible

Also remember that:

before taking any expoure in the sky, always remember to check that the TV mirror has been taken out of the light path. Remove it by typing ccd or tv off at the SYS> prompt
the guide star server can be accessed by logging on to lpvs3 as user GSS (password on whiteboard)
to play sounds (eg to signal the end of a run) you can use the audioplay command. The audioplayer will automatically play sounds located in the /soft/audio_sounds directory. Eg. run 1800 "long exposure"; audioplay rooster.au .

Telescope jumps and pointing restrictions

At ZD>45-50 degrees in the west the JKT show jumps that appear as double images on the CCD. Because of this the JKT is practically useless for HA>3. Please be aware of this when planning your observations!

Some info on DOME flats

How many seconds do i need to expose in UBVRI?

JKT night logs

JKT night logs are available on-line at the ING Nightlog Archive . Instructions on how to write a Night Report and print out the log are in the Basic User Guide

Reflectivity of the JKT mirrors

Other information with non-standard instrumentation

The basic user guide when using the Dutch controller for the CCD can be found here: Basic User Guide (Dutch Controller)

Useful Notes mainly for Duty Techs

JKT Duty Engineer Checks

Engineering Documentation

INS-DAS-13 Technical User's Guide to the Sparc Based DAS
INS-CCD-x Detailed Design of the Science CCD Server