The Liverpool Telescope is a fully-robotic 2 metre telescope owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University. It is sited at the international Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma.

MISSION:

Time-domain astronomy

DESCRIPTION:

The Liverpool Telescope, or "LT", is a fully robotic astronomical telescope owned and operated by the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University in north west England. It was designed and built by Telescope Technologies Limited (a spin-off company of the university) as the prototype of their production-line range of two-metre class telescopes. The LT was therefore the "first off the line".

The telescope itself is a two-metre Cassegrain reflector, with Ritchey-Cretien hyperbolic optics, on an alt-azimuth mount. Up to nine different instruments can be mounted at the Cassegrain focus, one in the "straight through" position and eight more on side ports accessible by a rotating "science fold" tertiary mirror. Over the years a wide variety of optical and near-IR imagers, spectrometers, and polarimeters have been mounted on the LT.

Contrary to its name, the Liverpool Telescope is not in fact in Liverpool, but in the Canary Islands. It's sited at the international Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the summit of the island of La Palma, westernmost of the Canaries, some 200 km off the coast of north-west Africa.

This site is one of the best astronomical sites in the world; the remoteness of the island, lack of urban development and local agreement to restrict artificial light pollution ensure the continued quality of the night sky. Among the many telescopes sited at the Observatory are the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (part of the Isaac Newton Group), the 3.6m Italian Galileo National Telescope and the 10m Spanish GranTeCan telescope. The LT is one of the most recent, and the only one which is robotic.