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Session 45 - Interstellar Medium I.
Display session, Tuesday, January 16
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
We have built a cooled Fabry-Perot spectrometer for observations of faint extended emission objects in the near infrared region. The goal of the project is to study the diffuse interstellar medium, primarily in the Galactic plane, by observing emission in the near infrared lines, which are almost unaffected by interstellar extinction. We present the first spectra of the Galactic diffuse ionized hydrogen emission in the Brackett-\gamma (\lambda=2.17\micron ) line at selected positions in the Galactic plane obtained with this spectrometer last summer. We also compare our results with radio recombination line data.
The spectral resolution of the instrument is 10000, and its field of view is 1\deg. The spectrometer can be scanned over a spectral range of about 300 km/s and is sky background limited. Observations are carried out without a telescope.
We are grateful for support of this project by NASA.
