Last commissioning: June 1999.
Designed and built by:
Astronomy Instrumentation Group, Physics Department, Durham University.
Supported by PPARC and the Paul Instrument fund.
Description: ELECTRA is
an adaptive optics instrument designed to operate in the visible part of
the spectrum. As with MARTINI-III it is housed at Nasmyth focus in the
Ground-based High Resolution Imaging Laboratory (GHRIL) at the William
Herschel Telescope (WHT). The instrument has a deformable mirror consisting of 76 individual segments. Each
of the segments is driven by three (hysteresis corrected) piezoactuators,
hence giving it 228-degrees-of- freedom. Hysteresis correction is maintained
through strain gages on the piezos.
More information: http://aig-www.dur.ac.uk/electra/
More photos of this instrument: http://www.ing.iac.es/PR/archive/wht/instruments.html
