The Alden Dome

The Alden Dome houses a permanently mounted fiber-fed spectrograph system. The components include:

Software Bisque Paramount Me German Equatorial mount: This state of the art mount is computer controlled and has remarkable precision for pointing and long-term tracking of celestial objects.

Takahashi FRC-300 Flat Field Ritchey-Chretien telescope: With its short focal length and wide flat field, this telescope excels at deep sky imaging and light collection for sensitive instruments. Focus is achieved with a computer controlled, temperature compensating focuser.

The optical head component of the spectrograph system. Fiber optic cables take the light gathered by the telescope and bring it to the main spectrograph instrumentation.

Shelyak Instruments Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph: This instrument designed by scientists François Cochard and Olivier Thizy allows students to research such astrophysics topics as:

  • Chemical composition and temperature of stars
  • Stellar pulsations
  • Stellar rotations
  • Redshifts of stars and galaxies
  • Double star systems
  • Extrasolar planets detection
  • Planetary composition