Related papers: Photonic spatial reformatting of stellar light for…
The spectral resolution of a dispersive astronomical spectrograph is limited by the trade-off between throughput and the width of the entrance slit. Photonic guided-wave transitions have been proposed as a route to bypass this trade-off, by…
Image slicing is a powerful technique in astronomy. It allows the instrument designer to reduce the slit width of the spectrograph, increasing spectral resolving power whilst retaining throughput. Conventionally this is done using bulk…
We present the results of our work on developing fully integrated devices (photonic dicers) for reformatting multimode light to a diffraction limited pseudo-slit. These devices can be used to couple a seeing-limited telescope…
We demonstrate a new approach to classical fiber-fed spectroscopy. Our method is to use a photonic lantern that converts an arbitrary (e.g. incoherent) input beam into N diffraction-limited outputs. For the highest throughput, the number of…
There are numerous advantages to exploiting diffraction-limited instrumentation at astronomical observatories, which include smaller footprints, less mechanical and thermal instabilities and high levels of performance. To realize such…
Recently, we demonstrated how an astrophotonic light reformatting device, based on a multicore fibre photonic lantern and a three-dimensional waveguide component, can be used to efficiently reformat the point spread function of a telescope…
As telescopes get larger, the size of a seeing-limited spectrograph for a given resolving power becomes larger also, and for ELTs the size will be so great that high resolution instruments of simple design will be infeasible. Solutions…
In recent years, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on achieving the diffraction limit with large aperture telescopes. For a well matched focal-plane instrument, the diffraction limit provides the highest possible angular resolution…
We have done theoretical calculations and simulations for infrared spectroscopy at the MMT 6.5 m with laser guide star AO, which provides almost full sky coverage. The results show we can expect 40-60% of the photons from a unresolved…
One of the most useful techniques in astronomical instrumentation is image slicing. It enables a spectrograph to have a more compact angular slit, whilst retaining throughput and increasing resolving power. Astrophotonic components like the…
We present an original method for reconstructing a three-dimensional object having two spatial dimensions and one spectral dimension from data provided by the infrared slit spectrograph on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. During…
The coupling of large telescopes to astronomical instruments has historically been challenging due to the tension between instrument throughput and stability. Light from the telescope can either be injected wholesale into the instrument,…
Adaptive optics systems are critical in any application where highly resolved imaging or beam control must be performed through a dynamic medium. Such applications include astronomy and free-space optical communications, where light…
Resolving fine details of astronomical objects provides critical insights into their underlying physical processes. This drives in part the desire to construct ever-larger telescopes and interferometer arrays and to observe at shorter…
One of the problems of producing instruments for Extremely Large Telescopes is that their size (and hence cost) scales rapidly with telescope aperture. To try to break this relation alternative new technologies have been proposed, such as…
Optical spectrometers have propelled scientific and technological advancements in a wide range of fields. While sophisticated systems with excellent performance metrics are serving well in controlled laboratory environments, many…
Direct imaging instruments have the spatial resolution to resolve exoplanets from their host star. This enables direct characterization of the exoplanets atmosphere, but most direct imaging instruments do not have spectrographs with high…
Here, we present an astrophotonic spectrograph in the near-IR H-band (1.45 -1.65 $\mu m$) and a spectral resolution ($\lambda/\delta\lambda$) of 1500. The main dispersing element of the spectrograph is a photonic chip based on…
We derive an analytic expression for the instrument profile of a slit spectrograph, also known as the line spread function. While this problem is not new, our treatment relies on the operatorial approach to the description of diffractive…
Optical beams and starlight distorted by atmospheric turbulence can be corrected with adaptive optics systems to enable efficient coupling into single-mode fibers. Deformable mirrors, used to flatten the wavefront in astronomical…