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Session 42 - Ground-Based Optical Telescopes & Instruments.
Display session, Tuesday, January 14
Metropolitan Ballroom,
The Upgraded Fiber Optic Echelle (UFOE) is a fiber-fed, white pupil echelle spectrograph to be implemented at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in the spring of 1997. It will serve as the commissioning spectrograph until HET facility instruments come on line in early 1998. This instrument is a quick, cost effective upgrade of the Fiber Optic Echelle, resident at KPNO for a decade.
The UFOE will be capable of R = 13,900 (Nyquist limited 2 pixels/resel), with complete spectral coverage from 530 nm to 850 nm and about 90order separation. It utilizes a 2.5 meter radius 400 mm diameter spherical mirror to reimage an ``average'' pupil between the echelle and the cross-dispersing grating onto the entrance pupil of a 200 mm f/2 camera lens. Due to the reduction of vignetting made possible with the pupil mirror, it is estimated that the UFOE will have an efficiency of 13% on the sky when used on the HET, whereas the FOE had an efficiency of 8%. This efficiency, combined with the 9 meter aperture of the HET, should allow a limiting magnitude of V = 18.9 for a 3000 second exposure with S/N = 30 per 1/2 resel.
This spectrograph has been designed and constructed at Penn State and we present results of characterization of image quality, vignetting, and focal plane characteristics.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: harlow@astro.psu.edu
