Current status of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope wide field upgrade and VIRUS

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is an innovative large telescope of 9.2 meter aperture, located in West Texas at the McDonald Observatory. The HET operates with a fixed segmented primary and has a tracker which moves the fourmirror corrector and prime focus instrument package to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of objects. A major upgrade of the HET is in progress that will substantially increase the field of view by replacing the corrector, tracker and prime focus instrument package. In addition to supporting the existing suite of instruments, this wide field upgrade will feed a revolutionary new integral field spectrograph called VIRUS, in support of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). This paper discusses the current status of this upgrade.

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