The Macquarie University campus observatory has recently undergone a significant upgrade, with a new fully- automated 0.6 m telescope and on-site facilities including an instrumentation laboratory. Here we report on the design, assembly, and first on-sky tests of a new high-resolution echelle spectrograph for the observatory. This spectrograph will be a key resource at our campus observatory, providing high fidelity measurements that will enable future research, in particular Master and PhD theses that require stellar spectroscopy or radial velocity measurements. The instrument will also form a cornerstone of the laboratory components of the undergraduate astronomy degree, and together with the new 0.6 m telescope, a key tool for project-based learning at the campus observatory. The instrument has been developed with radial velocity precision as the driving metric, and with future work on the environmental stabilisation it is expected to reach a radial velocity precision of 3 m s−1, enabling the observation of a wide range of exoplanets.
High precision Doppler observations of bright stars can be made efficiently with small aperture telescopes. We are constructing a high resolution echelle spectrograph for the new 0.6 m telescope at Central Washington University. The spectrograph is fed by a multimode fiber and operates in the visible wavelength range of 380-670 nm. The spectrograph uses a white pupil design with 100 mm beam diameter and a monolithic R4 echelle grating.
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