MMTF: The Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter
Abstract
This paper describes the Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter (MMTF) on the Magellan-Baade 6.5-meter telescope. MMTF is based on a 150-mm clear aperture Fabry-Perot (FP) etalon that operates in low orders and provides transmission bandpass and central wavelength adjustable from ~5 to ~15 A and from ~5000 to over ~9200 A, respectively. It is installed in the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) and delivers an image quality of ~0.5" over a field of view of 27' in diameter (monochromatic over ~10'). This versatile and easy-to-operate instrument has been used over the past three years for a wide variety of projects. This paper first reviews the basic principles of FP tunable filters, then provides a detailed description of the hardware and software associated with MMTF and the techniques developed to observe with this instrument and reduce the data. The main lessons learned in the course of the commissioning and implementation of MMTF are highlighted next, before concluding with a brief outlook on the future of MMTF and of similar facilities which are soon coming on line.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0908.1629,
title = {MMTF: The Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter},
author = {S. Veilleux and B. J. Weiner and D. S. N. Rupke and M. McDonald and C. Birk and J. Bland-Hawthorn and A. Dressler and T. Hare and D. Osip and C. Pietraszewski and S. N. Vogel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.1629},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
38 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, now accepted for publication to the Astronomical Journal