  A new 1.8-m wide-field alt-az survey telescope was installed at Mt John
University Observatory in New Zealand in October 2004. The telescope will be
dedicated to the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) project. The
instrument is equipped with a large 10-chip mosaic CCD camera with 80 Mpixels
covering about 2 square degrees of sky. It is mounted at the f/3 prime focus.
The telescope will be used for finding and following microlensing events in the
galactic bulge and elsewhere, with an emphasis on the analysis of microlensing
light curves for the detection of extrasolar planets. The MOA project is a
Japan-New Zealand collaboration, with the participation of Nagoya University
and four universities in New Zealand.
