Large Zenith Telescope
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The Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) is a big implementation of zenith telescopes that looks into the zenith, that is, straight up. It is located in the University of British Columbia's Malcolm Knapp Research Forest, about 70km east of Vancouver.
While a zenith telescope has the obvious disadvantage of not being able to look anywhere but a small spot straight up, its simplified setup permits the use of a mirror consisting of a smoothly spinning pan filled with liquid mercury. Such a mirror can be made much larger than a conventional mirror, greatly increasing light collecting ability.
The LZT has 6.0 m diameter liquid mirror which makes it one of the very biggest optical telescopes in the world, but still quite inexpensive.
The LZT is used for transit imaging, meaning that earth's rotation moves stars along the sensor, and the latent image in the sensor is moved electronically in step with this movement and read out at the trailing edge.
