The status of the Whipple 10m GRANITE III upgrade program

The Whipple Collaboration has been carrying out an upgrade program, GRANITE III, on the 10m telescope atop Mt. Hopkins. The 3 year program, 1996 through 1999, has involved a large field-of-view camera, a hardware pattern recognition trigger, and finally a small pixel camera. Results of the first and second stage of the program indicate that a large field-of-view yield an increased collection area for cosmic-ray triggers and the hardware pattern trigger reduces the energy threshold of the telescope by greatly suppressing night sky accidental triggers over a simple multiplicity coincidence trigger. The final phase of the program, being completed during the summer and fall of 1999, will be the installation of a small pixel camera. The pixel size of ∼0°.12 will yield the lowest threshold energy at which the 10 m Whipple telescope has ever operated.