JILA Fellow John Hall will deliver the 2006 Richard C. Lord Lecture on May 2, on “Optical clocks, combs and coherence: defining and measuring optical frequency.” Born in 1934 in Denver, Hall is an alumnus of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he received B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. He conducted postdoctoral studies at the Department of Commerce’s National Bureau of Standards, now cal...

Using the Echellete Spectrograph Imager (ESI) on the Keck II 10-m telescope we have measured the redshifts of the host galaxies of gamma-ray bursts GRB990506 and GRB000418, z = 1.30658 ± 0.00004 and 1.1181 ± 0.0001, respectively. Thanks to the excellent spectral resolution of ESI (λ/∆λ = 13000) we resolved the [O II] 3727 doublet in both cases. The measured redshift of GRB990506 is the highest ...

We discuss the design of an inexpensive, high-throughput CCD spectrograph for a small telescope. By using optical fibers to carry the light from the telescope focus to a table-top spectrograph, one can minimize the weight carried by the telescope and simplify the spectrograph design. We recently employed this approach in the construction of IntroSpec, an instrument built for the 16-inch Knowles...

We acquired spectra of 24 LMC PNe in the 1150–3000 Å range in order to determine carbon and other ionic abundances. The sample more than doubles the number of LMC PNe with good quality UV spectra in this wavelength range, and whose optical images are available in the HST archive. The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph was used with a very large aperture to obtain virtually slit-less spectra, ...