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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. © 2000 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overview of the current status and scientific goals of VERITAS, a proposed hexagonal array of seven 10 m aperture imaging Cherenkov telescopes, is provided. The selected site is close to Mt. Hopkins, the site of the Whipple Observatory, in Arizona. Each telescope, of 12 m focal length, will be equipped with a 499 element photomultiplier camera covering a 3.5 degree field of view. A central station will initiate the readout of 500 MHz FADCs upon receipt of multiple telescope triggers. The minimum detectable flux sensitivity will be 0.5% of the Crab Nebula flux at 200 GeV. VERITAS will operate primarily as a γ-ray observatory in the 50 GeV to 50 TeV range for the study of active galaxies, supernova remnants, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts. © 2000 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]