AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 30. New Instruments
Oral, Wednesday, January 6, 1999, 2:00-3:30pm, Room 9 (A and B)

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[30.04D] Near Infrared Faint Object Spectroscopy

K. A. Ennico (IfA, U. Cambridge, England)

My thesis work spanned over the design, building, testing and commissioning of a novel ground based astronomical instrument, COHSI, the Cambridge OH Suppression Instrument, which will be used in the next few years in the field of near infrared faint object spectroscopy. COHSI filters out the bright near infrared (1.0-1.8 micron) sky background using special suppression masks to enable integral field and multi-object nightsky suppressed spectroscopy down to J>20, H>19. The thesis involves a discussion of the scientific motivation for undertaking the construction of a complicated instrument (Chapter 1), an investigation of the near infrared night sky and its impact on instrument sensitivity (Chapter 2), a discussion of the potential sensitivity gains and design restrictions for a hardware suppression instrument (Chapter 3), an analysis of the optical design of COHSI (Chapter 4), and a detailed review of the major components of COHSI (e.g., optics, cryogenics, detectors) (Chapters 5,7,8). In particular, mention is made for a new technique of fabricating OH suppression masks which we developed in our lab (Chapter 6). Discussion of the instrument's performance during its commissioning on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in March 1998 is given (Chapter 9). The thesis concludes with a summary of the next steps in COHSI's instrument development as well as future paths for near infrared sky background reduction in the age of larger detectors and telescope facilities (Chapter 10).


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~kennico/thesis/index.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: kennico@ast.cam.ac.uk

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