The VERITAS collaboration reports the detection of very-high-energy ( VHE ) gamma-ray emission from the high-frequency-peaked BL Lac object 1ES 1218+304 located at a redshift of z = 0.182 .
A gamma-ray signal was detected with a statistical significance of 10.4 standard deviations ( 10.4 \sigma ) for the observations taken during the first three months of 2007 , confirming the discovery of this object made by the MAGIC collaboration .
The photon spectrum between \sim 160 GeV and \sim 1.8 TeV is well described by a power law with an index of \Gamma = 3.08 \pm 0.34 _ { stat } \pm 0.2 _ { sys } .
The integral flux is \Phi ( \textrm { E } > 200 \textrm { GeV } ) = ( 12.2 \pm 2.6 ) \times 10 ^ { -12 } \mathrm { cm ^ { -2 } s% ^ { -1 } } , which corresponds to \sim 6 % of that of the Crab Nebula .
The light curve does not show any evidence for VHE flux variability .
Using lower limits on the density of the extragalactic background light in the near to mid-infrared we are able to limit the range of intrinsic energy spectra for 1ES 1218+304 .
We show that the intrinsic photon spectrum has an index that is harder than \Gamma = 2.32 \pm 0.37 _ { stat } .
When including constraints from the spectra of 1ES 1101-232 and 1ES 0229+200 , the spectrum of 1ES 1218+304 is likely to be harder than \Gamma = 1.86 \pm 0.37 _ { stat } .