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K. Taylor, R.W. Weber, S. Blais-Ouellette, M.C. Britton (California Institute of Technology), D.J.A. Jones (Prime Optics, Queensland, Australia)
MILES is a 4-shooter multi-slit UV/optical spectrograph concept designed for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project which uses a focal reducer as a fore-optics relay to increase field of view, reduce the size of the multi-slit units and to simplify the spectrograph optics. The system delivers a 75 square arcminute total field of view which is divided into 4 sub-fields at the telescope's Nasmyth focal surface. Exceptional optical performance is delivered at all field angles and wavelengths down to the atmospheric cut-off. In order to facilitate single laser ground-layer adaptive optics (SL-GLAO) the focal reducer is constrained to image the telescope pupil onto a 200mm diameter relay mirror. The implementation of SL-GLAO on MILES delivers increases in signal-to-noise, spatial resolution and wavelength coverage that far outweigh any small throughput losses that are encountered in the focal reducer. This work was funded as part of the TMT project's conceptual design.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.