ESO 3.6 M Telescope - Instruments

Instruments

Since April 2008, the only instrument on the ESO 3.6m telescope is HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher. HARPS is a fibre-fed high resolution echelle spectrograph dedicated to the discovery of extrasolar planets. Other instruments on the telescope, now decommissioned, include:

• CES: A spectrograph providing a resolving power of up to 235,000 in the 346 - 1028 nm region.
• EFOSC2: The ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (v.2) to give its full name, is a very versatile instrument for low resolution spectroscopy and imaging.
• TIMMI-2 Thermal Infrared MultiMode Instrument dedicated to the 3 micron to 25 micron
• ADONIS, an acronym for ADaptive Optics Near Infrared System, was a second-generation adaptive optics system for the astronomical community. More than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles were published based on this instrument data. ADONIS is the final version of diverse Adaptive Optics (AO) prototypes named Come-on and Come-on +. It was offered in its final version in October 1996 as an official ESO instrument, then decommissioned in 2001. ADONIS was the first AO system offered to a large community of astronomers.