The $25 million telescope consists of two mirrors, one main with a diameter of 3.4 meters and a weight of 4 tons, and a secondary mirror with a diameter of 60 centimeters. The whole telescope and rotating dome has 120 thousand pieces. Its 250-ton rotating dome structure is suspended on 8 wheels, which can withstand all environmental loads and rotate in any direction as smoothly as possible
With this Iranian telescope, we can observe up to 7 billion light years (almost half of the life of the universe) and objects deeper than 7 billion light years can be observed with longer exposure, but the optimal limit is the same 7 billion years.
In this telescope, some works have been done for the first time in Iran, such as: hydrostatic bearings and mirror actuators, whose task is to maintain the shape of the mirror at all angles in the order of nanometers.
The 3.4 meter glass purchased with 2 grams of 99.999% pure aluminum with a thickness of 60 to 80 nanometers has been coated with sputtering technology and turned into the original mirror. This high-tech coating layer includes the following:
1) Vacuum technology, which did not exist on such a scale in the country before, and small or medium chambers were used to test satellites (a chamber of about 4 meters in a very high vacuum.
2) System technology that aluminum plasma and vaporize it and make a layer on the primary glass
The location of the observatory is not cloudy in 250 nights of the year, and it is one of the best areas in the world to obtain atmospheric visibility parameters, and its average for the Iranian telescope has reached 0.65 arc seconds and up to 0.5 arc seconds in the nights that it has visibility.
In the future, with more settings, we will have an even better view, of course, the wonderful tracking system of this telescope looks for the target with an accuracy of less than 0.1 arc seconds! (0.1 seconds of arc means 1 on 3600 degrees)
