Current Performance and On-Going Improvements of the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope

An overview of the current status of the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope constructed and operated at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan is presented. The basic design concept and the verified performance of the telescope system are described. Also given are the status of the instrument package offered to the astronomical community, the status of operation, and some of the future plans. The status of the telescope reported in a number of SPIE papers as of the summer of 2002 are incorporated with some updates included as of 2004 February. However, readers are encouraged to check the most updated status of the telescope through the home page, http://subarutelescope.org/index.html, and/or the direct contact with the observatory staff.Comment: 18 pages (17 pages in published version), 29 figures (GIF format), This is the version before the galley proo

Performance highlights of the ALMA correlators

Two large correlators have been constructed to combine the signals captured by the ALMA antennas deployed on the Atacama Desert in Chile at an elevation of 5050 meters. The Baseline correlator was fabricated by a NRAO/European team to process up to 64 antennas for 16 GHz bandwidth in two polarizations and another correlator, the Atacama Compact Array (ACA) correlator, was fabricated by a Japanese team to process up to 16 antennas. Both correlators meet the same specifications except for the number of processed antennas. The main architectural differences between these two large machines will be underlined. Selected features of the Baseline and ACA correlators as well as the main technical challenges met by the designers will be briefly discussed. The Baseline correlator is the largest correlator ever built for radio astronomy. Its digital hybrid architecture provides a wide variety of observing modes including the ability to divide each input baseband into 32 frequency-mobile sub-bands for high spectral resolution and to be operated as a conventional 'lag' correlator for high time resolution. The various observing modes offered by the ALMA correlators to the science community for 'Early Science' are presented, as well as future observing modes. Coherently phasing the array to provide VLBI maps of extremely compact sources is another feature of the ALMA correlators. Finally, the status and availability of these large machines will be presented