The Blanco telescope and its instruments: a status report

摘要

In recent years the V. M. Blanco 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) has been renovated for use as a platform for a completely new suite of instruments: DECam, a 520-megapixel optical imager, COSMOS, a multi-object optical imaging spectrograph, and ARCoIRIS, a near-infrared imaging spectrograph. This has had considerable impact, both internally to CTIO and for its wider community of observers. In this paper, we report on the performance of the renovated facility, ongoing improvements, lessons learned during the deployment of the new instruments, how practical operations have adapted to them, unexpected phenomena and subsequent responses. We conclude by discussing the role for the Blanco telescope in the era of LSST and the new generation of extremely large telescopes.