The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is a 2.6-m ESO telescope at Cerro Paranal equipped with OmegaCAM, a 268-megapixel camera covering a 1°×1° field of view. CASU contributed to data processing for VST public surveys including KiDS, VST ATLAS and VPHAS+.
The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is the largest telescope in the world built specifically to survey the sky in visible light. It is a 2.6-metre ESO telescope at Cerro Paranal Observatory in Chile, and its camera, OmegaCAM, has 268 megapixels and a field of view of 1° × 1°, twice the width of the full Moon.
The VST was built to support the VLT with wide-field optical imaging, finding and characterising objects that could then be followed up with spectroscopy on the VLT Unit Telescopes. Its time was given to survey programmes, including:
- KiDS, the Kilo-Degree Survey, a weak gravitational lensing survey
- VST ATLAS, a wide photometric survey of the southern sky
- VPHAS+, the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane
Instrument characteristics
| Camera | OmegaCAM, 32 CCDs, 268 megapixels |
|---|---|
| Telescope | 2.6-m primary mirror (Ritchie-Chrétien) |
| Pixel scale | 0.21″ per pixel |
| Field of view | 1° × 1° (about twice the width of the full Moon) |
| Location | ESO Cerro Paranal Observatory, Chile |
CASU's involvement
CASU helped develop the VST pipeline and its quality control, drawing on many years of processing wide-field optical and infrared surveys from the Isaac Newton Telescope and other instruments.
