Projects

CFHT and its communities prepare the future of the Observatory

In addition to serving the community of today's users, CFHT is constantly involved in developing new projects and getting prepared to welcome the instrumentation for tomorrow's astronomy.

Future Instruments

SPIRou

SPIRou is a cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph and polarimeter covering the near-infrared domain up to the K band with a resolution over 70,000. It is designed to provide radial velocity determinations with a 1m/s accuracy.
SPIRou just passed its final design review in April 2014 and starts construction, as a Guest Instrument at CFHT. The international SPIRou consortium is led by LATT/IRAP in Toulouse, France (PI: J.-F. Donati).

Ongoing Developments

OPERA

OPERA is the Open-source Pipeline for ESPaDOnS Reduction and Analysis. The project page is here and the software can be downloaded from Sourceforge here. It is in a stage of optimization and validation (February 2015).

MSE

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer is a proposed upgrade of CFHT into a 10m-class dedicated spectroscopic facility. Full details can be found at http://mse.cfht.hawaii.edu

Previous developments

SITELLE - The latest instrument integrated at CFHT. For more information, please consult the SITELLE pages at CFHT

GRACES - A fiber link between CFHT and Gemini. For more information, consult the GRACES pages at Gemini.

Dome venting - A project to improve the dome seeing

OAP - Observatory Automation Project

DANCE - Dual Amplifier New CCD for ESPaDOnS

`OHANA - Optical Hawaiian Array for Nanoradian Astronomy

CLOE - The CFHT-LSP On-sky Experiment

Gyes - a wide-field multi-object spectrograph project

'IMAKA - a high-resolution wide-field optical imager