UVES - Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph
Summary
UVES is the high-resolution optical spectrograph of the VLT located at the
Nasmyth B focus of UT2. It is a cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph
designed to operate with high efficiency from the atmospheric cut-off at 300 nm
to the long wavelength limit of the CCD detectors (about 1100 nm). To this
aim, the light beam from the telescope is split in two arms (UV to Blue,
and Visual to Red) within the instrument. The two arms can be
operated separately, or in parallel via a dichroic beam splitter. The resolving
power is about 40,000 when a 1-arcsec slit is used. The
maximum (two-pixel) resolution is 80,000 or 110,000 in the Blue- and the
Red Arm, respectively. Three image slicers are also available to obtain high
resolving power without excessive slit loss. The instrument is built
for maximum mechanical stability and allows for accurate
wavelength calibration. An iodine cell can be inserted in the light beam
for observations requiring extremely high accuracy for radial
velocity measurements.
Publications based on data obtained with the UVES instrument should quote the following reference paper: Dekker, H. et al. 2000, SPIE, 4008, 534.
Contact Information
- Questions related to service mode observations and proposal preparation should be addressed to the User Support Department.
- Questions related to visitor mode observations should be addressed to Paranal Science Operations.
- Please send us your comments, suggestions and report errors and inaccurate statements in the web pages and manuals.
Content of these pages
The following items are available on all the UVES pages, using the bar on the left.
- Overview: a short description of the instrument
- News: list of changes affecting the instrument and/or its pages.
- Instrument Description: all the important parameters of the instrument.
- Manuals: links to all the documents related to UVES.
- Tools: a collection of useful tools and informations for preparing and analyzing the UVES observations.
- Instrument Operations Team
- Visitor Instructions: Instrument specific instructions for Visiting Astronomers