The WHT supports a wide variety of spectroscopic and imaging instruments. Within the limited resources available for telescope operation it becomes ever more difficult to optimally support the growing number of instruments. Consequently, some instruments will have to be withdrawn from the pool of facility instruments. These instruments must be maintained and enhanced to retain their competitive status. These instruments are novel and are still being developed and enhanced to provide cutting edge science capability.
All instruments are competitive and enjoy a reasonable level of interest from the community.
The three workhorse instruments are the most popular with users, and also produce the bulk of the published papers. The newly developed instruments enjoy a still growing number of users, as one would expect. Both instruments do fill a need in areas where they are still competitive. LDSS combines high throughput with the multiplex advantages of multi-slit spectroscopy, which is important for studies of densely packed clusters of stars or galaxies. It was recently decided to stop offering the latter two instruments as common-user instruments in order to allow observatory staff to focus effort on a smaller number of instruments.