Finding your target.

Forums Spectroscopy How do you find your target? Finding your target.

#578880
Dr Andrew Smith
Participant

Hi John, as David said this can be a big challenge. My fiber guide head has a field of about 10 arc minutes. Which is too small to reliably plate solve. Although I did manage to make this work with the slightly larger field of a LISA spectrograph.

One relativity cheap solution is to use a flip mirror which works well if you are finding by eye at the scope. Otherwise you would need to add a DIY solution to flip the mirror and another camera.

Another expensive solution is to use a dichroic mirror. I use an Innovations Foresight ONAG and a third CCD in my automated system but light longer than 7500 A  is not available to the spectrograph. However, I could find no other solution to automatically finding and centering the target..

Regards Andrew