Previous abstract Next abstract

Session 5 - Education.
Display session, Monday, January 13
Metropolitan Ballroom,

[5.13] Development of the Little Telescope: Design and Construction of a High Precision Fiber Fed Spectrograph

C. E. Groppi (NSF REU Intern, Cornell U.)

I present the design, construction and initial data from a fiber optic fed spectrograph built for use in Cornell Universitiy's advanced undergraduate laboratory course with the 0.6m Hartung Boothroyd Observatory telescope. The design goals of the instrument are to accurately and consistently measure the periodic radial velocity shifts in spectroscopic binary systems, which requires stability greater than 10 km/s. The instrument uses a 100\micron step index fiber, a commercial camera lens and a 1200\fraclinesmm grating blazed at 7500Åto achieve a resolution of 1650. A liquid nitrogen cooled Thompson TH 7882 CCD camera, also built by Cornell undergraduates, is the detector; the complete system achieves a dispersion of 1.4Åper pixel. Initial data show a velocity stability of \approx2 km/s The data reduction procedure uses a frequency domain correlation of a target spectrum with a high signal to noise template spectrum to determine the velocity shift. Maximum entropy interpolation is used to create a uniformly sampled time series of velocity shifts, which is then used to extract the orbital information of the stellar system


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: groppi@iras3.tn.cornell.edu

Program listing for Monday