Coating Unit

 [Coating Unit]

The VLT 8-meter mirror coating unit was built at Deggendorfer Werft, Germany. Linde A.G., Germany as the main contractor and BOC-Coating Technology, U.K. as the major subcontractor for the vacuum and process technology worked together to construct the coating unit. The major functionality and vacuum and thin film deposition performance was verified before the coating plant was dismantled and shipped to Chile.The provisional acceptance tests of the coating unit on the Paranal Observatory were done in July/August 1997.