Chiron - A Fiber-fed High-resolution Echelle Spectrometer At Ctio 1.5m Telescope

Details Chiron - A Fiber-fed High-resolution Echelle Spectrometer At Ctio 1.5m Telescope Chiron - A Fiber-fed High-resolution Echelle Spectrometer At Ctio 1.5m Telescope

May 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21840903s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #409.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Small telescopes can play an important role in the search for exoplanets because they offer an opportunity for high cadence observations that are not possible with large aperture telescopes.
CHIRON is a highly stable cross-dispersed echelle spectrometer deployed at CTIO 1.5m telescope. It is fed by fiber and intended primarily for precise radial velocities. It is currently mainly used to search for low mass planets around alpha Centauri A and B. An iodine cell is used for wavelength calibration.
The optical layout is a classical echelle with 150 mm collimator size. The bench-mounted spectrometer is fiber-fed followed by an image slicer or a slit mask. For the grating, we used the existing R2 echelle grating (that has a throughput of about 50%). An apochromatic refractor is used as the camera. Image quality of the design is excellent over the full spectral range.
The instrument has been commissioned in March 2011. It has four observing modes: (a) unsliced fiber (R = 25,000-30,000), (b) image slicer (3 slices, R=80,000), (c) wide slit (R = 80,000-90,000) and (d) narrow slit (R = 120,000). The spectral format spans 4200 to 8700 Angstroms. The total throughput of the telescope and spectrometer is 5-6%. Replacement of the grating and coating of the prism will further improve the efficiency.
Furthermore, the spectrometer is in a closed temperature-stabilized environment and pressure stabilization is currently being implemented. An exposure meter to precisely calculate the photon-weighted mid-point time will be installed in June 2011.

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