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Session 5 - Solar System Objects.
Display session, Monday, June 09
South Main Hall,
The WIYN 3.5-meter telescope and its Multi-Object Bench Spectrograph have been used in combination with two different fiber optic focal plane sampling strategies to obtain simultaneous spectra at of order 90 3 arc seconds points in the coma of Comet Hale-Bopp. Between 1996 October and 1997 April in excess of 5000 individual spectra at time resolutions of as little as 3 minutes were obtained. On six nights the "Hydra" fiber positioner was used to sample a ring pattern of points about the nucleus with a minimum spacing of 40 arc seconds and a maximum radius of 22.5 arc minutes. On two nights (with two more opportunities after the deadline for this abstract) a new "dense pack" fiber cable was used. In this configuration a 7 x 13 rectangular pattern of 91, 3 arc second fibers on 4 arc second centers was used. In most cases the bench spectrograph was used in the echelle configuration with an interference filter to isolate a single order. The wavelength range \lambda \lambda 6100 - 6400 Å\ was recorded with resolution R \approx 15,000. This spectral region contains the emission features of [O I], C_2, NH_2 and H_2O^+. This display paper will describe the observing strategy and rationale and present some preliminary results. More complete results should be available by the time of the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in late July. This research is supported by NSF grant AST - 9615625.
