Charalambous, Andrew;
(1996)
Opto-mechanical design for large telescope instrumentation.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Many telescopes of the four-metre class were built during the 1950s. One of these was the AAT, which was built by Grubb Parsons for the AAO and sited at Siding Springs, New South Wales, Australia. UCLES is a high-resolution optical spectrograph at the coude focus of the AAT. It is the most successful and popular instrument on the AAT. UCLES was designed, constructed, and commissioned in 1988, by a team from UCL. The first part of this thesis describes the opto-mechanical and mechanical engineering design produced for UCLES by the Author, and its performance. During the 1980s production began on the next generation of telescopes, with apertures of eight metres and above. They have resulted in the design of a corresponding new generation of instrumentation. These new telescopes have imposed greater demands on the performance of their instrumentation, and therefore the engineering required to produce them. The most spectacular of these is the Keck telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, with a 10 metre effective aperture formed from 36 hexagonal mirrors. The LRIS was commissioned on Keck in 1991, and is the largest cassegrain-focus spectrograph ever built. The second part of the thesis deals with the opto-mechanical and mechanical design of the collimator and red grating turret for the LRIS. These were designed by the Author, and made under his supervision at UCL, under contract from Caltech. The thesis also describes his involvement in the commissioning of the instrument at Mauna Kea, and observations made with LRIS. The work for both these spectrographs required original, challenging and novel design methods. This thesis describes the Author's work, and methods used. It also provides a critical analysis of the performance of both instruments.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Opto-mechanical design for large telescope instrumentation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Thesis digitised by ProQuest. |
| Keywords: | Applied sciences; Opto-mechanical; Spectrographs; Telescopes |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10102103 |
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