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RE: Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes
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The ING Telescopes Contribute to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) contributed data to the research which led to the award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Saul Perlmutter of UC-Berkeley. Using wide-field imaging techniques implemented on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in the early nineties, and subsequent imaging and spectroscopy using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), among others, the Supernova Cosmology Project team led by Perlmutter discovered that the expansion of the Universe, long-believed to be decelerating due to the effects of gravitational attraction, was in fact accelerating, that is, galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago. This result provided the foundation for the current, widely-accepted model of the Universe, in which the dynamics are dominated by what is called dark energy. The key paper was published in 1999.
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ING Vision 2010 - 2020

Our strategic vision of the WHT for the next decade is that of a telescope that operates a range of instruments offered for classical observing on a large fraction of the year, while we increase the time devoted to surveys with key instruments with strategic importance to our communities - instruments where a 4m telescope delivers more science than larger telescopes. Current discussions suggest that such strategic instrument will be a wide field multi-object spectrograph at the WHT prime focus, designed for efficient follow-up of galactic and extragalactic surveys that will become available in the coming years. The ING will continue to provide valuable access to the Northern sky to our communities. We will enhance our visitor instrument programme, and to offer small fractions of WHT time for the development of technologies useful for E-ELT instrumentation. Our developments will take into account recommendations of European review committees on intermediate-size telescopes.
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First Spectroscopic Observations Using an Electron-Multiplying CCD
Astronomers at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) have recently used, for the first ever time, an electron-multiplying detector for astronomical spectroscopic observations, allowing a high-time resolution analysis of the orbital motion of a short orbital period cataclysmic variable. These observations would have been much more time consuming, if not impractical, with a conventional CCD and demonstrates the tremendous potential of the electron-multiplying camera technology.
The ING now offers three electron-multiplying CCD cameras as part of its detector suite. The first of these, based on a small format CCD60 sensor, has been in use for several years as a wavefront sensor in the GLAS adaptive optics system. More recently two more larger format 1k×1k pixel cameras, named QUCAM2 and QUCAM3, have been commissioned. These both contain a CCD201-20 sensor which is of frame transfer design and allows efficient high speed spectroscopy on ISIS spectrograph.

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