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 and sensitivity per pixel. But it offers another key advantage as we now show. Conventionally, as the telescope aperture D grows, the instrument size grows in...

The Potsdam Arrayed Waveguide Spectrograph (PAWS) is based on an integrated photonic spectrograph designed and developed by innoFSPEC to work in the astronomical H-band. PAWS demonstrates how a traditional bulk optics can be miniaturized additionally serves as tool for testing in-house astrophotonical devices. main element second-generation Grating (AWG) with unprecedented performance terms of ...

This paper presents an outline of the software, written by the author, for the reduction of bidimensional spectral data obtained with the Russian 6-meter telescope using the Multi-Pupil Field Spectrograph (MPFS). The MPFS uses diierent detectors, an IPCS and CCDs, in combination with a scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer, etc. The principal algorithms, concerning the basic reduction steps such ...

We broadly discuss mid-infrared spectroscopy and detail our new high spectral resolution instrument, the Texas Echelon-cross-Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES).

We present an analysis of high resolution HST Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) observations of O I λ1356 and H I Lyman-α absorption in 36 sight lines that probe a variety of Galactic disk environments and include paths that range over nearly 4 orders of magnitude in f(H2), over 2 orders of magnitude in 〈nH〉, and that extend up to 6.5 kpc in length. Since the majority of these sight l...

Diffraction-limited spectroscopy with adaptive optics (AO) has several advantages over traditional seeing-limited spectroscopy. First, high resolution can be achieved without a large loss of light at the entrance slit of the spectrograph. Second, the small AO image width allows the cross-dispersed orders to be spaced closer together on the detector, allowing a large wavelength coverage. Third, ...