Astronomical Instrumentation

Thanks to a generous gift from Leonard Goodman in honor of his father Abraham, the physics and astronomy department was funded to set up a laboratory in Phillips Hall for the development of astronomical instrumentation. The novel Goodman facility spectrograph for SOAR (see picture) was built under the leadership of lab director Prof. Chris Clemens. Dr. Clemens has also developed the capability of designing and fabricating in house custom, large format, high efficiency volume-phase holographic gratings for very large telescopes. Prof. Gerald Cecil is leading other lab efforts including Lucky Imaging using an electron-multiplied (i.e. photon counting) CCD and multi-object areal optical spectroscopy with adaptive optics for SOAR, PROMPT, and eventually other telescopes.