Capabilities

• Prism crossdispersed Echelle spectrograph, working in quasi Littrow mode with a two-beam, two-slice image slicer.
• White pupil configuration.
• Bench mounted in the thermally stabilized and humidity controlled Coudé room of the ESO 1.52-m telescope.
• Fiber fed, two fibers will simultaneously feed the spectrograph. Either the pair will be [object + sky] to record the object and the sky background simultaneously or [object + external calibration] where the second fiber is fed by a calibration lamp during the whole exposure to monitor the instrument stability.
• Resolving power 48000 (2 pixel resolution).
• Entrance aperture of 2.7 arcsec; this keeps slit losses below 12% for a seeing of 1.5 arcsec and keeps the effect of differential atmospheric refraction up to z=60° (airmass = 2) negligible.
• Wavelength range 3700-8600 Å
• Use of a highly efficient 2kx4k CCD with 15x15 micron pixels.
• High efficiency with 27% peak efficiency, 7 (1.7)% in the extreme blue at 3700 (3500) Å and 8% in the extreme red at 9000 Å .
• Fixed configurations, the bench-mounted part of the spectrograph contains no movable or remotely controlled components besides the CCD shutter. This ensures easy maintenance and reproducible and stable output formats. With this an accuracy in radial velocities of better than 50 m/s is expected. The usage of an iodine cell for achieving a radial velocity accuracy of about 5 m/s will be evaluated.
• Full on-line data reduction in the MIDAS environment and tools for subsequent archiving and analyses e.g. radial-velocity and time-series analysis.

If you have any comments on the FEROS project, please send me a mail .