Physics – Optics
Scientific paper
May 1993
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993aas...182.5104b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 182nd AAS Meeting, #51.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 25, p.886
Physics
Optics
Scientific paper
We describe a recent effort to use a NICMOS 3 chip as the detector on the 160" coude spectrograph camera at Lick Observatory. This new instrument (IRCS) has a useful spectral range of 1-2mu with spectral coverage in one exposure of about 25 Angstroms, and resolutions up to 75000. We have successfully obtained astronomical observations with essentially no modification of the (uncooled) spectrograph, using an existing grating blazed at 1.22mu , and a dewar without optics (but containing a filter) easily mounted at the position of the old photographic plates. The throughput of the system is very high. Its sensitivity is primarily limited by the background from the warm spectrograph. Using filters with 0.1mu bandwidth, the expected background is negligible below 1.5mu , but limits exposures to one minute near 2mu . With an optimized dewar, one can remain photon (rather than background) limited down to 10th magnitude even at 2mu . Our current system (using a test dewar and engineering grade chip) has been tested at 1.6mu . We have operated with and without an image slicer. We show spectra and discuss the current successes and problems. Our first application is to study the Zeeman--sensitive line at 1.56mu at high resolution. We expect to be able to achieve S/N of 200:1 in 10 minutes on 6th magnitude stars now, and eventually 100:1 in one hour on 10th magnitude stars using the 3-m telescope. This opens the possibility of measuring magnetic fields for large numbers of RS CVN and dM(e) stars (in addition to many G,K dwarfs), and even perhaps a few pre-main sequence stars. There is a lot of potential for science in the 1-2mu range at high resolution, which cannot be done as easily with any other type of instrument. This includes: (1) molecular lines in giants and winds, (2) lines from the ISM for abundances and kinematics, (3) detailed atmospheric analysis of embedded stars (and disks?).
Basri Gibor
Marcy Geoffrey W.
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