ING Telescopes
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) consists of the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), operating on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain. The INT began scheduled use by the astronomical community in May 1984 and the WHT in August 1987. The ING is located at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, one of the best astronomical sites in the world. Its core mission includes the execution of top-quality research with the best telescopes of their class in the world.
Infrastructure and User Services
The ING provides astronomers in the Netherlands with access to the Northern Hemisphere sky in the optical and infrared, providing a unique opportunity to combine their radio observations obtained with LOFAR and WSRT, to study the Milky Way’s outer disk and halo and the Northern extragalactic sky. The ING consists of two optical/infrared telescopes, the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), and their digital archives.
Examples/description of the type of research
The WHT is equipped with the WEAVE spectroscopic survey facility, comprised of a new 2º field-of-view prime focus corrector with a 1000-multiplex fibre positioner, 20 small individually-deployable integral field units (IFUs), and a large IFU, each of which can feed a dual-beam spectrograph that provides full coverage of the visible spectra at a resolution of 5000 or two narrower wavelength ranges at resolution 20000. The instrument is designed specifically to provide spectra of any of the 1.5 billion stars that ESA’s astrometric satellite Gaia won’t be able to measure itself and to provide dedicated follow-up of the NL-led LOFAR surveys. WEAVE will help Gaia to revolutionize our understanding of the formation and evolution of our own Milky Way and LOFAR to deepen our understanding of the evolution of gas out to times when the Universe was only a few billion years old and to find sources that will directly probe the Epoch of Reionization. WEAVE will also study a variety of other front-line topics, from stellar evolution to distant quasars. WEAVE will be the dominant instrument on the WHT for the period 2025-2030, to be used more than 70% of the total nights available on the telescope.
The INT will soon host a new high-resolution, high-stability, robotic spectrograph, HARPS3, designed and built for the search and characterisation of Earth-sized exoplanets, which will be the dominant instrument on the INT in the years 2025-2034.
How to access the infrastructure?
Observing time is awarded primarily by the Dutch, Spanish and UK time-allocation committees (TACs), who meet once per semester. Telescope proposals should be submitted directly to the TACs, following the instructions linked under 'Proposal submission information' one the ING website pages and by the deadlines given on the same pages. The TACs evaluate the quality and technical feasibility of the proposals and rank them.
Up to 5% of ING telescope time is also available for large-scale international projects through the International Time Programme (ITP). This time is allocated on an annual basis by the International Scientific Committee (CCI).
Archival data is open to the world after 1 year (for data taken up to 2021) or no more than 2 years (for data taken after 2021).