Related papers: Smart Focal Plane Technologies for VLT Instruments

The single-mirror small-size telescope (SST-1M) is one of the three proposed designs for the small-size telescopes (SSTs) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project. The SST-1M will be equipped with a 4 m-diameter segmented mirror dish…

I argue that there is a crisis in optical Astronomy due to a paucity of telescopes and thus the need for a paradigm shift in telescope technology. Large increases in collecting areas and observing time/astronomer are only possible if we…

SINFONI, the SINgle Faint Object Near-infrared Investigation, is an instrument for the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which will start its operation mid 2002 and allow for the first time near infrared (NIR) integral field spectroscopy at the…

The very recent years have seen a promising start in scientific publications making use of images produced by near-infrared long-baseline interferometry. The technique has reached, at last, a technical maturity level that opens new avenues…

In the ELTs era, where the need for versatile and innovative solutions to produce very high spatial resolution images has become a major issue, the search of synergies with other science fields seems a logic step. One of the considered…

Long-baseline interferometry and high-resolution spectroscopy are two examples of areas that have benefited from astrophotonics devices, but the application range is expanding to other subareas and other wavelength ranges. The VLTI has been…

The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer is a NASA-funded nulling and imaging instrument designed to coherently combine the two 8.4-m primary mirrors of the LBT for high-sensitivity, high-contrast, and high-resolution infrared imaging…

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is a unique telescope featuring two co-mounted optical trains with 8.4m primary mirrors. The telescope Adaptive Optics (AO) system uses two innovative key components, namely an adaptive secondary mirror…

The Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) is one of the two instruments onboard the ESA PLANCK satellite foreseen to be launched in 2007. The LFI will image the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies and the polarization in four different…

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory. CTA consists of different telescope types of which the largest ones (Large-Sized Telescopes, LSTs) cover the lower energy range, between 20…

The Small Telescopes Installed at the Liverpool Telescope (STILT) have been in operation since March 2009, collecting wide field data from their position, mounted to the Liverpool Telescope. The two instruments; SkycamT and SkycamZ have…

In 2006 ESO Council authorized a Phase B study of a European AO-telescope with a 42 m segmented primary with a 5-mirror design, the E-ELT. Several reports and working groups have already presented science cases for an E-ELT, specifically…

New facilities and technologies have advanced our understanding of massive stars significantly over the past 30 years. Here I introduce a new large survey of massive stars using VLT-FLAMES, noting the target fields and observed binary…

Advances in astronomy are often enabled by adoption of new technology. In some instances this is where the technology has been invented specifically for astronomy, but more usually it is adopted from another scientific or industrial area of…

Two of the three instruments proposed to ESO for the second generation instrumentation of the VLTI would use integrated optics for beam combination. Several design are studied, including co-axial and multi-axial recombination. An extensive…

A transformation optics approach was used to derive a general method for designing electromagnetic devices able to manipulate the wave vectors in the specific manner required by the functionality of the device. While the wave paths inside…

Design and construction of the instruments for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) began in 2015. We present here a brief overview of the status of the ELT Instrumentation Plan. Dedicated articles on each instrument are presented…

We propose a new instrumental concept for long-baseline optical single-mode interferometry using integrated optics which were developed for telecommunication. Visible and infrared multi-aperture interferometry requires many optical…

The VIRMOS consortium of French and Italian Institutes (PI: O. Le Fevre, co-PI: G. Vettolani) is manufacturing two wide field imaging multi-object spectrographs for the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope (VLT), with emphasis…

EAGLE is the multi-object, spatially-resolved, near-IR spectrograph instrument concept for the E-ELT, relying on a distributed Adaptive Optics, so-called Multi Object Adaptive Optics. This paper presents the results of a phase A study.…