The CDK20 South Planewave Instruments 20-inch (0.5-meter) f/6.8 corrected Dall Kirkham telescope is shown here with its optical designer Joe Haberman at Mt. Kent Observatory in Queensland, Australia, at the time of its installation in 2006. Its identical northern companion is at Moore Observatory in Kentucky. The corrected Dall Kirkham optical system provides a unique, wide, diffraction-limited, flat field ideal for CCD imaging and photometry. The telescopes at Mt. Kent and at Moore Observatory are on computer-controlled German equatorial Planewave A200HR mountings that run our XmTel software.

Instrumentation available for remote operation of the telescopes includes

• Apogee U16M CCD 4096x4096 9 micron (0.54") pixels
• Johnson-Cousins, Sloan, narrow band, and color imaging filter wheels
• Precision encoded focuser
• Nikon D200 and 85 mm f/1.4 wide field color camera
• Watec integrating video wide field finder
• 180 degree fisheye view of the night sky with a Watec integrating video camera
• Axis pan-tilt-zoom low light level network camera in the dome
• Axis quad video server to send realtime video to the remote observer
• Network controlled power switching
• RFID tag encoded dome rotation
• RF remote control of dome shutter

The Mt. Kent CDK20 photo gallery has more views of the observatory, telescope, and instrumentation.

Images taken with the telescopes which demonstrate the exceptional resolution and wide field are available in the Shared Skies Gallery.

These telescopes are used by Shared Skies, a collaboration of the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Louisville that provides remote and robotic astronomical instrumentation for university students, as well as continuuing and distance education in Kentucky and Australia. We also offer hand-on training for teachers through the facilities of the Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium.