Las Campanas Observatory

Telescopes

• The Magellan Telescopes are two identical single-mirror reflecting telescopes. The Walter Baade Telescope saw first light in 2000, and the Landon Clay Telescope in 2002. They are managed by LCO for an international consortium of institutions which includes LCO.
• The du Pont Telescope is named after industrialist Irénée du Pont and has been in operation since 1977. It is a Ritchey-Chrétien telescope with a Gascoigne corrector lens, and was built by Boller & Chivens and L&F Industries.
• The Swope Telescope was the first telescope installed at LCO, and began operating in 1971. It is named after CIS astronomer Henrietta Swope. It is a Ritchey-Chrétien telescope built by Boller & Chivens with a Gascoigne corrector lens.

  Tenant telescopes

• The Warsaw Telescope is the main instrument of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment operated by the University of Warsaw Observatory. Installed in 1996, it is a Ritchey-Chrétien design built by DFM Engineering. Exact location: ± 1 meter, altitude of the base of the building over mean sea level.
• The All Sky Automated Survey is a project to monitor the southern sky for variable stars. It consists of two wide-field telescopes, one narrow field telescope, and one ultra-wide field telescope. A prototype system was installed in 1996 and a second in 1997, both in the same enclosure as the 10-inch astrograph. The three larger telescopes were installed in 2000. The ultra-wide device was added in 2002 when the existing telescopes were moved to a new, smaller enclosure. Location: ± 5 meter.
• The Hungarian Automated Telescope South facility is part of the HATNet Project to detect exoplanets using the transit method. It consists of a pair of four Takahasi reflecting astrographs on a common mount. It was installed in 2009.
• The Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network operates at station at LCO.

  Former telescopes

• The NANTEN millimeter-wavelength radio telescope was located at LCO from 1995 to 2004. It is now located at the Pampa La Bola site of the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory and is known as the NANTEN2 Observatory.
• The Helen Sawyer Hogg Telescope was operated at LCO by the University of Toronto Southern Observatory from 1971 to 1997. It is now located at Leoncito Astronomical Complex.
• A astrograph operated at the site for some time, and was used to discover Supernova 1987A.
• The Pi of the Sky project operated two wide-angle cameras that searched for the optical signature of gamma ray bursts at LCO starting in 2004. The installation was moved to a commercial telescope hosting site in San Pedro de Atacama in 2011.

  Future telescopes

• The Giant Magellan Telescope is an extremely large telescope under construction at LCO, with completion expected in 2025. It is effective aperture design with seven segments. The telescope will have a light-gathering area of, which is roughly fifteen times greater than one of the Magellan telescopes. The mirrors are being fabricated by the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, and the first was started in 2005.

  Discoveries

Gallery