Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-75dct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-02T17:06:15.122Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fibre Optics at the UK Schmidt Telescope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2016

F. G. Watson  and
J. A. Dawe
F. G. Watson
Affiliation:
UK Schmidt Telescope of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, Siding Spring Observatory
J. A. Dawe
Affiliation:
UK Schmidt Telescope of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, Siding Spring Observatory
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The four-fold advantage over a conventional 4 m reflector which naive information theory confers on the 1.2 m UK Schmidt telescope (Dawe and Watson 1982, Watson 1983) is only approachable in practice under certain rather specific conditions. These relate principally to the surface distribution on the sky of the object classes of interest, and the type of detection employed. Clearly, for general survey work with sky-limited photographic detection, the information advantage is high, but it can be demonstrated (Dawe and Watson 1983) that the relatively new technique of multi-object fibre-optics spectroscopy (eg Hill et al. 1980, 1982, Gray 1983, Lund and Enard 1983) with linear detectors offers very high potential in certain regimes of operation. In particular, the UK Schmidt telescope (UKST) equipped with 400 fibre channels has four times the effective light grasp (= number of fibres utilized × aperture) of a 4 m reflector (with a 1 deg field and equipped with any number of fibres) for target objects with surface densities between approximately 1 and 10 per square degree (Dawe and Watson 1983). Objects ranging from galactic variable stars to quasars lie within these limits, but of especial interest are galaxies, whose apparent luminosity function in this range of surface densities runs from magnitudes 15 to 17 (MacGillivray, private communication). Large-scale, medium accuracy (60 km s−1) redshift surveys of galaxies within this magnitude range promise to be extremely fruitful (Davis 1982) and are easily within the reach of the UKST fibre-coupled to a CCD spectrograph (Watson and Dawe 1984).

Type
Contributions
Information
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , 1984 , pp. 579 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of Australia 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Davis, M., in Astrophysical Cosmology (eds Brack, H. A., Coyne, G. V. and Longair, M. S.), p. 113, Vatican (1982).Google Scholar
Dawe, J. A. and Watson, F. G., ‘Proposal for a radical extension in the use of the UK Schmidt telescope’, ROE Internal Report (1982).Google Scholar
Dawe, J. A. and Watson, F. G., IAU Colloquium No. 78, Asiago (1983).Google Scholar
Dawe, J. A. and Watson, F. G., submitted to Optica Acta (1984). Eastman Kodak Company, Kodak Plates and Films for Scientific Photography, p. 30 (1973).Google Scholar
Cray, P. M., Proc. SPIE, 445, 57 [Proceedings of the Society of Photooptical Instrumentation Engineering] (1983).Google Scholar
Hill, J. M., Angel, J. R. P., Scott, J. S., Lindley, D. and Hintzen, P., Astrophys. J., 242, L69 (1980).Google Scholar
Hill, J. M., Angel, J. R. P., Scott, J. S., Lindley, D. and Hintzen, P., Proc. SPIE, 331, 279 (1982).Google Scholar
Lund, G. and Enard, D., Proc. SPIE, 445, 65 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLean, I. S., Cormack, W. A., Herd, J. T. and Aspin, C., Proc. SPIE, 290, 155 (1981).Google Scholar
Minowa, J. and Fujii, Y., Jour. Lightwave Tech., 1, 116 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unterleitner, F. C., Laser Focus, 19, 68 (1983).Google Scholar
Watson, F. G., J. Brit. Astron. Assoc, 93, 193 (1983).Google Scholar
Watson, F. G., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 206, 661 (1984a).Google Scholar
Watson, F. G., in preparation (1984b).Google Scholar
Watson, F. G., Coyte, E., Paterson, M. J., Russell, K. S. and Ahearn, P., in preparation (1984).Google Scholar
Watson, F. G. and Dawe, J. A., submitted to Optica Acta (1984).Google Scholar