Deployment of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope wide field upgrade

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is an innovative large telescope located in West Texas at the McDonald Observatory. The HET operates with a fixed segmented primary and has a tracker, which moves the four-mirror optical corrector and prime focus instrument package to track the sidereal and non-sidereal motions of objects. A major upgrade of the HET is in progress that will substantially increase the pupil size to 10 meters (from 9.2 m) and the field of view to 22 arcminutes (from 4 arcminutes) by replacing the corrector, tracker, and prime focus instrument package. In addition to supporting existing instruments, and a new low resolution spectrograph, this wide field upgrade will feed a revolutionary new integral field spectrograph called VIRUS, in support of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX§). The upgrade is being installed and this paper discusses the current status.