Atmospheric dispersion causes light from celestial objects with different wavelengths to refract at varying angles as it passes through Earth's atmosphere. This effect results in an elongated image at the focal plane of a telescope and diminishes fiber coupling efficiency into spectrographs. We propose an optical design that incorporates a Rotational Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (RADC) to address the broadband dispersion encountered in the multi-object mode of the High-Resolution Optical Spectrograph (HROS) on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). The RADC corrects the dispersion across the entire wavelength range (0.31-1 micron), using Amici prisms optimized for over 90% transmission efficiency and minimal angular deviation of the beam from the optical axis after dispersion correction. For enhanced accuracy, particularly in the blue region, we have, for the first time, implemented the Filippenko (1982) model in Zemax via a custom Dynamic-Link Library (DLL) file.
@article{arxiv.2511.03225,
title = {A new broadband atmospheric dispersion corrector for HROS-TMT},
author = {Manjunath Bestha and Thirupathi Sivarani and Bachar Wehbe and Amirul Hasan and Bharat Chandra P and Devika K Divakar and Athira Unni and Parvathy Menon and Arun Surya and Pallavi Saraf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03225},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in Royal Astronomical Society Techniques and Instruments (RASTI)