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A large telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, designed specifically for spectroscopy. A partnership between the University of Texas at Austin and several other universities in the USA and Germany, it began full operation in 1997. It has an 11-metre (36-foot) segmented mirror permanently tipped at a 35-degree angle to the zenith, mounted on a structure that can rotate in azimuth to point in any direction. The telescope tracks its targets with the aid of a movable secondary mirror. Though the tilt of the main mirror is fixed, the telescope will nevertheless be able to observe objects in about 70 per cent of the sky accessible from the site.
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