Thermal conditioning of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope dome

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is an innovative, low cost 9- meter telescope that specializes in queue mode spectroscopic observing. Because of the HET's unique design, careful day- time and night-time thermal conditioning of the interior dome environment is essential to optimizing the telescope's performance on the sky during astronomical research operations. In this contribution, we describe the past and present thermal conditioning techniques that have been developed and employed at HET to optimize the telescope's scientific performance.