The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is the world's third largest optical telescope. The telescope is a collaboration between the University of Texas at Austin, The Pennsylvania State University, and Stanford University in the United States and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen, and Goerg-August-Universitaet Goettingen in Germany. It was designed and constructed to gather a very large amount of light, specifically for spectroscopy, at extremely low cost. HET's huge size allows it to see very dim objects and determine their spectrum. HET's unusual design allows the primary mirror to stay put during an observation and only smaller focusing instruments suspending above the primary move to track an astronomical object.

Find Out More

• Official HET Site

• HET at PSU
• NASA's Space Optics Manufacturing Technology Center
• Penn State HET Photos
• Penn State HET Seminars and Presentations

Recent Developments

• 16 April 2004 - Evidence that a cometlike body with a diameter of at least 100 kilometers fell into a massive, very young star has been obtained by a team of astronomers at Penn State using the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. Read More