Starlight enters the dome and glimmers from the telescope's 8.1-meter primary mirror. The perfectly formed concave mirror passes starlight to the secondary mirror that refocuses the light and reflects it through a small hole in the center of the primary mirror. There, a third mirror transmits starlight to any of five electronic instruments that an astronomer uses to peer into the night sky. Scientists sitting in the control room evaluate images sent from the base of the telescope to Sun monitors. When an image is worth saving, the astronomer instructs a workstation to open the camera shutter and expose a digital plate 30 times more sensitive than conventional film to the light.
Observations can last several nights.
A Sun Ultra 60 server , along with a multidisk storage system, records each sweep of the celestial hemisphere and sends the data to a second network server located in the town of Hilo, forty miles away. Some 50 Sun workstations help scientists remove imperfect data, store observations, and transmit information via the Internet to astronomers around the world. Sun equipment drives all but one telescope at the summit and most large telescopes worldwide. That is the niche from which we will produce outstanding results, especially using adaptive optics, which works best in the infrared. The telescope offers scientists an opportunity to confirm new planets by actually seeing them.