THE GALILEO ITALIAN NATIONAL TELESCOPE AND ITS INSTRUMENTATION

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 o f the TNG is the Observatorio del Rogue de los Muchachos, in the Canar y Island of La Palma. Construction activities, started in 1993, are ne aring completion. The telescope structure, after testing in the Ansald o factory near Milano, has been disassembled and is gradually being tr ansported and installed on site, in parallel with the rotating dome. T he three main mirrors, figured by ZEISS, will be transported in spring '96 to the WHT plant at the Rogue for aluminisation before installati on on the telescope. Three major subsystems still undergo intensive ac tivity in Italy, namely testing of the M2 and M3 units, testing of the operational version of the control hardware and software, and constru ction of the two Rotator Adapters (R/A) for the Nasmyth foci. First li ght instruments are also being built. Nasmyth Arm A is reserved for ti le imaging section, composed by a visual camera, a near-IR camera, plu s a common adaptive optics module. On arm B, a faint object spectrogra ph with long slit, atmospheric dispersion corrector, multiobject and i maging capabilities, will be mounted. A fixed high resolution spectrog raph with optical derotation is also being designed. Attention has alr eady been given to the archive of the data. It is planned to have firs t light at the end of 1996, and to start regular scientific operations after an adequate period of debugging and commissioning.