Digital Commons Network^™

A Prototype Visible To Near-Infrared Spectrograph For The Chara Array, A Long-Baseline Stellar Interferometer, Chad Elliott Ogden

Physics and Astronomy Dissertations

This work is a description of the Visible to near Infrared Spectrograph system for the CHARA array. The CHARA Array is a 6-telescope interferometer at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains north of Pasadena, California. It combines the light from the 1-meter telescopes, and measures the visibility of the resulting interference fringes, which gives information about the source intensity distribution on the sky. The resolution of the instrument is proportional to the telescope separation, or baseline, divided by the wavelength. The VIS system operates in the 600-1000~nm wavelength range, a factor of 3 to 4 shorter than the standard …