Related papers: Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light…
The spectral resolution of a dispersive spectrograph is dependent on the width of the entrance slit. This means that astronomical spectrographs trade-off throughput with spectral resolving power. Recently, optical guided-wave transitions…
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…
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…
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…
Adaptive optics (AO) has revolutionized imaging in {fields} from astronomy to microscopy by correcting optical aberrations. In label-free microscopes, however, conventional AO faces limitations due to the absence of guidestar and the need…
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…
We demonstrate for the first time an efficient, photonic-based astronomical spectrograph on the 8-m Subaru Telescope. An extreme adaptive optics system is combined with pupil apodiziation optics to efficiently inject light directly into a…
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 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…
With the upcoming extremely large telescopes (ELTs), the volume, mass, and cost of the associated spectrographs will scale with the telescope diameter. Astrophotonics offers a unique solution to this problem in the form of single-mode…
Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…
Photonic technologies offer numerous advantages for astronomical instruments such as spectrographs and interferometers owing to their small footprints and diverse range of functionalities. Operating at the diffraction-limit, it is…
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,…
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…
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…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a powerful image correction technique with proven benefits for many life-science microscopy methods. However, the complexity of adding a reflective wavefront modulator and a wavefront sensor into already complicated…
The burgeoning field of astrophotonics explores the interface between astronomy and photonics. Important applications include photonic OH suppression at near-infrared wavelengths, and integrated photonic spectroscopy. These new photonic…
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…
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…