MMT Pointing And Tracking

The Multiple Mirror Telescope exhibits good tracking performance and excellent pointing accuracy. Considerable engineering effort has been expended over the past four years to investigate methods for improving accuracy, and to identify and understand the sources of the remaining errors. We can achieve tracking errors as low as 0.5 arcseconds peak-to-peak without autoguiding, and RMS pointing errors better than 1 arcsecond, but changes of approach may be needed to reach our tracking performance goals.