Telescope:

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The telescope is a 35cm Schmidt Cassegrain (Celestron 14) telescope mounted on a Losmandy G-11 German equatorial mount.

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Instrument:

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The main instrument used on this telescope is the Miniature High Precision Polarimetric Instrument (Mini HIPPI). This is a smaller and somewhat simplified version of the HIPPI and HIPPI-2 instruments we use on larger telescopes. Mini HIPPI is described in a paper in MNRAS. These instruments use Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal (FLC) polarization modulators operating at 500 Hz, together with Photomultipler Tube (PMT) detectors. Mini HIPPI measures the linear polarization of the light from a star or planet with a precision measured in parts per million.

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Mini HIPPI was built at UNSW. It is constructed using mostly 3D printed parts and is extremely compact and lightweight (about 650g) allowing it to easily be mounted on small telescopes. The pictures below show the optical systems and the instrument mounted on the UNSW telescope.