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Astronomy

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you for your answer! To double check, does the shutter array takes the place of a traditional linear slit? I remember placing a slit of a high-dispersion spectrometer across Jupiter's equator in an undergraduate lab exercise (a zillion years ago) and measuring the Doppler-induced tilting of the resulting lines. In this case, do the shutters just form a non-linear slit? Moving in the direction perpendicular to the dispersion, only zero or one is opened at each "height"? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 23:45
  • $\begingroup$ One reason for writing my previous comment is that some vision-impaired people use text-to-speech conversion, so while the "non-linear slit" concept might be self-evident in some images, it doesn't hurt to state it explicitly in text as well, perhaps referring to the images for backup. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 3:36
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh How many slitlets can be open at each "height" depends on the extent of the spectrum on the image. One usually tries to avoid overlapping spectra. The concept is not at all new. Slit-mask multi-object spectrographs have been used for decades. The novelty here is being able to "make" the mask in software, rather than drilling a plate. $\endgroup$
    – ProfRob
    Commented Sep 13, 2020 at 8:24
  • $\begingroup$ @RobJeffries A million years ago as an undergraduate I built a gedankenspectrometer (i.e. thought about it) with a round fiber bundle at one end flattened to a line at the other, but in the early 1980's there were budget problems, the observatory closed and the faculty scattered and that ended my Astronomy "career" before it started. I'm very excited to see how spectra are "multiplexed" today, so I've asked How were "microshutters" or other multiplexed or multi-object techniques first used in Astronomical spectroscopy? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Sep 13, 2020 at 9:12