Mt. Lemmon Observatory's 24-inch (0.6-meter) Ritchie-Chrétien Manner Telescope
Our 0.6-meter Ritchie-Chretien telescope on Mt. Lemmon is operated remotely and semi-autonomously on most clear nights. Its high quality Zerodur optical system yields images which are limited only by site seeing, while its massive fork mounting provides stable continuous tracking for the CMOS image sensor and filter wheel system.
The telescope was Manufactured by RC Optical Systems in 2007, and was at Mark Manner's SPOT observatory near Nashville, Tennessee, before being moved to Mt. Lemmon in 2014. While in Tennessee, the telescope made many significant contributions to the KELT exoplanet survey that grew in its new location at the high alitude Mt. Lemmon site. It was donated to the University of Louisville in 2016 and is currently used for education and to contribute precision photometry to the NASA TESS follow-up program in search of transiting exoplanets. Data from this telescope are among the highest photometric quality of any for ground-based rapid transient events such as exoplanet transit measurements, at times better than 1 thousandth of a magnitude RMS over a duration of hours.
Incorporating SiTech electronics and software, the telescope acquires targets with arcsecond accuracy and maintains pointing with only small correctcions derived from science images from one exposure to the next. Telescope software also enables tracking low-Earth orbit satellites using their orbital elements.
For imaging and photometry, an ASI ZWO 6200 CMOS camera with a 9576×6388 array of 3.76 μm pixels is at the prime focus. Its Sony IMX455 back-illuminated low-noise sensor oversamples the seeing and provides a wide dynamic range wth part-per-thousand precision for stars brighter than 12th magnitude. In this mode, the telescope has contributed to the discovery and confirmation of dozens of extrasolar planets. The camera filter wheel provides the Sloan filter set g',r', i', and z' for photometry, with optional narrowband interference filters including SII, Hα, OIII, and Hβ for imaging available.
Manner is a near-twin to MORC, the telescope we operate at Moore Obsesrvatory in Kentucky. The prototype of both telescopes is the AZ20 altitude-azimuth mounted 0.5 meter telescope also at Moore Observatory.