The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) 10.4m telescope received its First Light on July 13, 2007. At present the GTC is undergoing commissioning tests. Night time observations are being carried out routinely from Monday through to Thursday every week. The GTC will begin science observation by the end of the year, and will be offered to the community in September 2008 for the semester starting in March 09. The two first generation science instruments are getting ready to be mounted on the telescope. In this talk I will go through the main features of the first generation science instruments and describe their status of completion. I will also devote some time to the second-generation instruments that are currently at various states of advancement. These include EMIR, a wide field multi-object K band cryogenic spectrograph, and FRIDA, which is a near IR Adaptive Optics fed integral field spectrograph. Finally, I will describe a set of smaller instruments that will complement and indeed extend the observing capabilities of the GTC soon after the start of science operation.

Date Published: 9 July 2008
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 7014, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy II, 701408 (9 July 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.787790

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7014:
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy II
Ian S. McLean; Mark M. Casali, Editor(s)