A High Resolution Spectrograph for the 72 cm Waltz Telescope at Landessternwarte, Heidelberg

Abstract

The Waltz Spectrograph is a fiber-fed high-resolution échelle spectrograph for the 72 cm Waltz Telescope at the Landessternwarte, Heidelberg. It uses a 31.6 lines/mm 63.5${}^{\circ }$ blaze angle échelle grating in white-pupil configuration, providing a spectral resolving power of $R\sim$65,000 covering the spectral range between 450$-$800\,nm in one CCD exposure. A prism is used for cross-dispersion of échelle orders. The spectrum is focused by a commercial apochromat onto a 2k$\times$2k CCD detector with 13.5$\mu$m per pixel. An exposure meter will be used to obtain precise photon-weighted midpoints of observations, which will be used in the computation of the barycentric corrections of measured radial velocities. A stabilized, newly designed iodine cell is employed for measuring radial velocities with high precision. Our goal is to reach a radial velocity precision of better than 5 m/s, providing an instrument with sufficient precision and sensitivity for the discovery of giant exoplanets. Here we describe the design of the Waltz spectrograph and early on-sky results.

7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Precise Radial Velocities of Giant Stars VII. Occurrence Rate of Giant Extrasolar Planets as a Function of Mass and Metallicity

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Precise radial velocities of giant stars -- XVII. Distinguishing planets from intrinsically induced radial velocity signals in evolved stars