The Galileo Italian National Telescope

The main features of the 3.5m Telescopio Nazionale GALILEO (TNG) have been derived from those of the ESO NTT, although with modifications in several areas, as described e.g. in Barbieri et al., 1994. The site of the TNG is the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, in the Canary Island of La Palma. Construction activities, started in 1993, are nearing completion. The telescope structure, after testing in the Ansaldo factory near Milano, has been disassembled and is gradually being transported and installed on site, in parallel with the rotating dome. The three main mirrors, figured by ZEISS, will be transported in spring '96 to the WHT plant at the Roque for aluminisation before installation on the telescope. Three major subsystems still undergo intensive activity in Italy, namely testing of the M2 and M3 units, testing of the operational version of the control hardware and software, and construction of the two Rotator Adapters (R/A) for the Nasmyth foci. First light instruments are also being built. Nasmyth Arm A is reserved for the imaging section, composed by a visual camera, a near-IR camera, plus a common adaptive optics module. On arm B, a faint object spectrograph with long slit, atmospheric dispersion corrector, multiobject and imaging capabilities, will be mounted. A fixed high resolution spectrograph with optical derotation is also being designed. Attention has already been given to the archive of the data. It is planned to have first light at the end of 1996, and to start regular scientific operations after an adequate period of debugging and commissioning.