Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter JungeAG

How to software-stabilize small spectrographs

Lukas Stock
Marburg University

Most modern high-resolution spectrographs operate in temperature and pressure stabilized environments. However, this is not the case for the majority of spectrographs at smaller observatories, where the spectrographs are located at or near the telescope itself. The instruments therefore experience temperature and pressure changes, which result in thermal expansions of various parts of the spectrograph. These mechanical changes can result in errors which can be much larger than the intrinsic resolution of the instrument. I will present various ways to determine and correct these errors with no or very little additional hardware costs. This leads to a software stabilization of the instrument, greatly increasing the resolution of the spectrograph.