Abstract
Several years ago we visited a colleague at the Astronomical Institute of the University of Leuven in Belgium. During the day he showed us their instrument laboratory. We came up with the need of an image slicer for the large focal length of our Cassegrain telescope. A laboratory employee then showed us one specially designed slicer for the Institute telescope. He said the price driver would be the very thin glass plate between the two prisms and the minimum price would be around 10,000 Euros. This was not very motivating for many years until ESO colleagues introduced a mirror slicer for around 300 Euros.
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Notes
- 1.
The light path inside an images slicer is relatively complex and requires a good three-dimensional imagination to understand it. This fact was probably the decisive step in the design of the first image slicer.
- 2.
The slicer is already very small. By virtually increasing the entrance focal length the entrance pupil becomes larger and manufacturing becomes easier.
- 3.
Astronomers refer to small and large telescope F-numbers as “fast” and “slow”, respectively.
- 4.
In fact, it is highly professional work applied to small telescopes. This includes investigations on fiber optics, slicer design and complete spectrographs.
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Eversberg, T., Vollmann, K. (2015). Image Slicer . In: Spectroscopic Instrumentation. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44535-8_9
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