This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 7735, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, and the Conference Committee listing.

In this paper we describe both recently completed instrumentation projects and our current development efforts in the context of the Observatory's science driven strategic plan which seeks to address key questions in observational astronomy for extra-galactic, Galactic, and planetary science with both seeing limited capabilities and high angular resolution adaptive optics capabilities. This paper will review recently completed projects as well as new instruments in development including MOSFIRE, a near IR multi-object spectrograph nearing completion, a new seeing limited integral field spectrograph for the visible wavelength range called the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, and the Keck Next Generation Adaptive Optics facility and its first light science instrument DAVINCI.

The first-generation instrument development programme for the VLT/I has now come to a close. The delivered instruments which have served the astronomical community since first light at Paranal in 1998, have provided astronomers with general purpose capabilities covering the available wavelength range from the UV to mid infrared. The second-generation programme has now begun with delivery of X-shooter, and a further six new instruments (SPHERE, MUSE, KMOS, ESPRESSO, GRAVITY, MATISSE) are under construction, marking a transition to more specialised scientific capabilities designed for a more limited but very ambitious set of science goals. In addition, instrumentation at La Silla telescopes continues to be effective in producing scientific results, especially through the planet-finder HARPS on the 3.6m. Future plans should see a transfer of resources to E-ELT instrument construction while new instrument development for the VLT will continue, but at a slower pace.

Developing new instruments and upgrading existing instruments has been an important aspect of Subaru telescope's operation. Seven facility instruments and two visiting instruments are currently under use. Among them HiCIAO, a coronagraphic imager combined with adaptive optics (AO188), has started its full operation in the 2nd semester of 2009. We are using HiCIAO for a large program (SEEDS) to find new exo-planets and comprehend planet formation from proto-planetary disks. To achieve higher contrast, a new coronagraph attachment with an extreme AO (SCExAO) will be installed as a PI instrument. AO188 is also used with the IRCS in natural guide star mode. Its laser guide star mode is currently commissioning. The Fibre multi-object spectrograph (FMOS), which is comprised of 400 fibers placed at the prime focus and delivers 0.9-1.8um spectra, will be partly offered to open use from mid 2010. Hyper Suprime-Cam, the wide-field upgrade (1.5 deg FoV) of the Suprime-Cam, is under development for its first light in 2011. Development of an immersion grating has taken place for upgrading the IRCS with a high-resolution infrared spectrograph.

The tenth anniversary of Gemini Observatory operation provides a convenient reference point to reflect on the past, present, and future of the instrumentation program. The Observatory will soon meet a significant milestone: the last batch of instruments from the first three generations of instrumentation development will be commissioned by the end of 2011. This will represent a revolution for Gemini-South, which will have a suite of new or upgraded, state of the art instruments. Included in this suite will be extreme and multi-conjugate adaptive optics systems, new infrared imagers and multi-object spectrographs, and state of the art CCD detectors. The Observatory is on the cusp of a new era with the fourth generation of instrumentation. While the past represented building a whole new observatory, the future represents renewal and reinvestment, with plans for a new high-resolution optical spectrograph, new acquisition and guide units, upgraded and refurbished instruments, and improved methods for developing Gemini instrumentation.

An overview of instrumentation for the Large Binocular Telescope is presented. Optical instrumentation includes the Large Binocular Camera (LBC), a pair of wide-field (27 × 27) mosaic CCD imagers at the prime focus, and the Multi-Object Double Spectrograph (MODS), a pair of dual-beam blue-red optimized long-slit spectrographs mounted at the straight-through F/15 Gregorian focus incorporating multiple slit masks for multi-object spectroscopy over a 6 field and spectral resolutions of up to 8000. Infrared instrumentation includes the LBT Near-IR Spectroscopic Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research (LUCIFER), a modular near-infrared (0.9-2.5 μm) imager and spectrograph pair mounted at a bent interior focal station and designed for seeing-limited (FOV: 4 × 4) imaging, long-slit spectroscopy, and multi-object spectroscopy utilizing cooled slit masks and diffraction limited (FOV: 0.5 × 0.5) imaging and long-slit spectroscopy. Strategic instruments under development for the remaining two combined focal stations include an interferometric cryogenic beam combiner with near-infrared and thermal-infrared instruments for Fizeau imaging and nulling interferometry (LBTI) and an optical bench near-infrared beam combiner utilizing multi-conjugate adaptive optics for high angular resolution and sensitivity (LINC-NIRVANA). In addition, a fiber-fed bench spectrograph (PEPSI) capable of ultra high resolution spectroscopy and spectropolarimetry (R = 40,000-300,000) will be available as a principal investigator instrument. The availability of all these instruments mounted simultaneously on the LBT permits unique science, flexible scheduling, and improved operational support. Over the past two years the LBC and the first LUCIFER instrument have been brought into routine scientific operation and MODS1 commissioning is set to begin in the fall of 2010.

In the ten years since the converted 6.5m MMT was dedicated the observatory has built up an impressive suite of instrumentation to compliment the three interchangeable secondary mirrors. This review paper presents an up-to-date perspective on all the capabilities of our full range of instrumentation, highlighting newly commissioned instruments (the MMT and Magellan InfraRed Spectrograph (MMIRS), an infrared spectrograph) and new modes or upgrades for established instruments (such as; Red Channel, the MMT's workhorse spectrograph, Hectochelle, an optical fiber-fed, multi-object spectrograph and the AO instruments CLIO, a 5 micron camera and BLINC, a mid-infrared camera). The MMT's pioneering adaptive secondary mirror can be used with both natural guide stars (NGS) or with a Rayleigh laser guide star (LGS) system. The LGS has recently demonstrated wide-field partial compensation with ground layer adaptive optics and here we present progress to date. Finally, we report on the start of a project to investigate how the instrument suite has contributed to the science productivity the MMT over the last 10 years.

Summary: The Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) is a second-generation VLT panoramic integral-field spectrograph currently in manufacturing, assembly and integration phase. MUSE has a field of 1x1 arcmin² sampled at 0.2x0.2 arcsec² and is assisted by the VLT ground layer adaptive optics ESO facility using four laser guide stars. The instrument is a large assembly of 24 identical high performance integral field units, each one composed of an advanced image slicer, a spectrograph and a 4kx4k detector. In this paper we review the progress of the manufacturing and report the performance achieved with the first integral field unit.

The AAO is building an optical high resolution multi-object spectrograph for the AAT for Galactic Archaeology. The instrument has undergone significant design revision over that presented at the 2008 Marseilles SPIE meeting. The current design is a 4-channel VPH-grating based spectrograph providing a nominal spectral resolving power of 28,000 and a high-resolution mode of 45,000 with the use of a slit mask. The total spectral coverage is about 1000 Angstroms for up to 392 simultaneous targets within the 2 degree field of view. Major challenges in the design include the mechanical stability, grating and dichroic efficiencies, and fibre slit relay implementation. An overview of the current design and discussion of these challenges is presented.

The Multi-Object Double Spectrographs (MODS) are two identical high-throughput optical low- to medium-resolution CCD spectrometers being deployed at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). Operating in the 340-1000nm range, they use a large dichroic to split light into separately-optimized red and blue channels that feature reflective collimators and decentered Maksutov-Schmidt cameras with monolithic 8×3K CCD detectors. A parallel infrared laser closed-loop image motion compensation system nulls spectrograph flexure giving it high calibration stability. The two MODS instruments may be operated together with digital data combination as a single instrument giving the LBT an effective aperture of 11.8-meter, or separately configured to flexibly use the twin 8.4-meter apertures. This paper describes the properties and performance of the completed MODS1 instrument. MODS1 was delivered to LBT in May 2010 and is being prepared for first-light in September 2010.

We describe the concept of a new instrument for the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT), SITELLE (Spectromètre Imageur à Transformée de Fourier pour l'Etude en Long et en Large de raies d'Emission), as well as a science case and a technical study of its preliminary design. SITELLE will be an imaging Fourier transform spectrometer capable of obtaining the visible (350 nm - 950 nm) spectrum of every source of light in a field of view of 15 arcminutes, with 100% spatial coverage and a spectral resolution ranging from R = 1 (deep panchromatic image) to R = 10⁴ (for gas dynamics). SITELLE will cover a field of view 100 to 1000 times larger than traditional integral field spectrographs, such as GMOS-IFU on Gemini or the future MUSE on the VLT. It is a legacy from BEAR, the first imaging FTS installed on the CFHT and the direct successor of SpIOMM, a similar instrument attached to the 1.6-m telescope of the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic in Québec. SITELLE will be used to study the structure and kinematics of HII regions and ejecta around evolved stars in the Milky Way, emission-line stars in clusters, abundances in nearby gas-rich galaxies, and the star formation rate in distant galaxies.

The 16 low resolution spectrographs (LRS) have been successfully commissioned for the LAMOST. The LRS design employs a dual-beamed and bench-mounted, with large-beamed, fast Schmidt cameras and Volume Phase Holographic (VPH) transmission gratings. The design wavelength range is 370-900nm, at resolutions of R=1000and R=10000. Each spectrograph is fed by 250 fibers with 320 micron in diameter (corresponding 3.3 arcsec), composed of one F/4 Schmidt collimator, a dichroic beam-splitter, four VPH gratings, articulating Schmidt cameras that are optimized at blue band (370-590 nm) and red band (570-900 nm), and field lens near the focal plane service as the vacuum window of CCD detector cryogenic head. In this paper, we present the testing result of the LRS on the image quality, spectra resolution, efficiency and observing spectra.

The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration is building the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 square degree, 520 Megapixel CCD camera which will be mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO. DECam will be used to perform the 5000 sq. deg. Dark Energy Survey with 30% of the telescope time over a 5 year period. During the remainder of the time, and after the survey, DECam will be available as a community instrument. Construction of DECam is well underway. Integration and testing of the major system components has already begun at Fermilab and the collaborating institutions.

We present the scientific motivations for GYES: a high multiplex (of the order of several hundred), high resolution (about 20 000), spectrograph to be placed at the prime focus of the CFHT. The main purpose of such an instrument is to conduct a spectroscopic survey complementary to the Gaia mission. The final Gaia catalogue (expected around 2020) will provide accurate distances, proper motions and spectrophotometry for all the stars down to a magnitude of 20. The spectroscopic instrument on board the Gaia satellite will provide intermediate resolution (R=11 500) spectra for stars down to the 17th magnitude. For the fainter stars there will be no radial velocity information. For all the stars the chemical information will be limited to a few species. A multifibre spectrograph at the prime focus of the CFHT will be able to provide the high resolution spectra for stars fainter than 13th magnitude, needed to obtain both accurate radial velocities and detailed chemical abundances. The possible use of GYES will not be limited to Gaia complementary surveys and we here describe the potentialities of such an instrument. We describe here how the scientific drivers are translated into technical requirements. The results of our on-going feasibility study are described in an accompanying poster.

ESPRESSO, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, will combine the efficiency of modern echelle spectrograph design with extreme radial-velocity precision. It will be installed on ESO's VLT in order to achieve a gain of two magnitudes with respect to its predecessor HARPS, and the instrumental radialvelocity precision will be improved to reach cm/s level. Thanks to its characteristics and the ability of combining incoherently the light of 4 large telescopes, ESPRESSO will offer new possibilities in various fields of astronomy. The main scientific objectives will be the search and characterization of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone of quiet, nearby G to M-dwarfs, and the analysis of the variability of fundamental physical constants. We will present the ambitious scientific objectives, the capabilities of ESPRESSO, and the technical solutions of this challenging project.

The One Degree Imager will be the future flagship instrument at the WIYN 3.5m observatory, once commissioned in 2011. With a 1 Gigapixel focal plane of Orthogonal Transfer Array CCD devices, ODI will be the most advanced optical imager with open community access in the Northern Hemisphere. In this talk we will summarize the progress since the last presentation of ODI at the SPIE 2008 meeting, focusing on optics procurement, instrument assembly and testing, and detector operations.

We report design, performance and early results from two of the Extremely High Precision Extrasolar Planet Tracker Instruments (EXPERT) as part of a global network for hunting for low mass planets in the next decade. EXPERT is a combination of a thermally compensated monolithic Michelson interferometer and a cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph for extremely high precision Doppler measurements for nearby bright stars (e.g., 1m/s for a V=8 solar type star in 15 min exposure). It has R=18,000 with a 72 micron slit and a simultaneous coverage of 390-694 nm. The commissioning results show that the instrument has already produced a Doppler precision of about 1 m/s for a solar type star with S/N~100 per pixel. The instrument has reached ~4 mK (P-V) temperature stability, ~1 mpsi pressure stability over a week and a total instrument throughput of ~30% at 550 nm from the fiber input to the detector. EXPERT also has a direct cross-dispersed echelle spectroscopy mode fed with 50 micron fibers. It has spectral resolution of R=27,000 and a simultaneous wavelength coverage of 390-1000 nm.

The 'Imaka project is a high-resolution wide-field imager proposed for the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea. 'Imaka takes advantage of two features of the optical turbulence above Mauna Kea: weak optical turbulence in the free-atmosphere and boundary layer turbulence which is highly confined within a surface layer tens of meters thick and or the telescope enclosures. The combination of the two allows a groundlayer adaptive optics system (GLAO) to routinely deliver an extremely-wide corrected field of view of one-degree at an excellent free-atmosphere seeing limit at visible wavelengths. In addition, populating the focal-plane with orthogonal-transfer CCDs provides a second level of image improvement on the free-atmosphere seeing and the residual GLAO correction. The impact of such an instrument covers a broad range of science and is a natural progression of CFHT's wide-field expertise.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a large aperture, wide-field facility designed to provide deep images of half the sky every few nights. There is only a single instrument on the telescope, a 9.6 square degree visible-band camera, which is mounted close to the secondary mirror, and points down toward the tertiary. The requirements of the LSST camera present substantial technical design challenges. To cover the entire 0.35 to 1 μm visible band, the camera incorporates an array of 189 over-depleted bulk silicon CCDs with 10 μm pixels. The CCDs are assembled into 3 x 3 "rafts", which are then mounted to a silicon carbide grid to achieve a total focal plane flatness of 15 μm p-v. The CCDs have 16 amplifiers per chip, enabling the entire 3.2 Gigapixel image to be read out in 2 seconds. Unlike previous astronomical cameras, a vast majority of the focal plane electronics are housed in the cryostat, which uses a mixed refrigerant Joule-Thompson system to maintain a -100ºC sensor temperature. The shutter mechanism uses a 3 blade stack design and a hall-effect sensor to achieve high resolution and uniformity. There are 5 filters stored in a carousel around the cryostat and the auto changer requires a dual guide system to control its position due to severe space constraints. This paper presents an overview of the current state of the camera design and development plan.

ESPRESSO, a very high-resolution, high-efficiency, ultra-high stability, fiber-fed, cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph located in the Combined-Coudé focus of the VLT, has been designed to detect exo-planets with unprecedented radial velocity accuracies of 10 cm/sec over 20 years period. To increase spectral resolution, an innovative pupil slicing technique has been adopted, based onto free-form optics. Anamorphism has been added to increase resolution while keeping the physical size of the echelle grating within reasonable limits. Anamorphic VPH grisms will help to decrease detector size, while maximizing efficiency and inter-order separation. Here we present a summary of the optical design of the spectrograph and of expected performances.

The Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) consists of a baseline build of 150 identical spectrographs (arrayed as 75 units, each with a pair of spectrographs) fed by 33,600 fibers, each 1.5 arcsec diameter, deployed over the 22 arcminute field of the upgraded 10 m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The goal is to deploy 96 units. VIRUS has a fixed bandpass of 350-550 nm and resolving power R~700. VIRUS is the first example of industrial-scale replication applied to optical astronomy and is capable of spectral surveys of large areas of sky. The method of industrial replication, in which a relatively simple, inexpensive, unit spectrograph is copied in large numbers, offers significant savings of engineering effort, cost, and schedule when compared to traditional instruments. The main motivator for VIRUS is to map the evolution of dark energy for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX+) using 0.8M Lyman-α emitting galaxies as tracers. The full VIRUS array is due to be deployed in late 2011 and will provide a powerful new facility instrument for the HET, well suited to the survey niche of the telescope. VIRUS and HET will open up wide field surveys of the emission-line universe for the first time. We present the design, cost, and current status of VIRUS as it enters production, and review performance results from the VIRUS prototype. We also present lessons learned from our experience designing for volume production and look forward to the application of the VIRUS concept on future extremely large telescopes (ELTs).

We are designing the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) as a new facility instrument for the Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO). KCWI is based on the Cosmic Web Imager (CWI), an instrument that has recently had first light at the Hale Telescope. KCWI is a wide-field integral-field spectrograph (IFS) optimized for precision sky limited spectroscopy of low surface brightness phenomena. KCWI will feature high throughput, and flexibility in field of view (FOV), spatial sampling, bandpass, and spectral resolution. KCWI will provide full wavelength coverage (0.35 to 1.05 μm) using optimized blue and red channels. KCWI will provide a unique and complementary capability at WMKO (optical band integral field spectroscopy) that is directly connected to one of the Observatory's strategic goals (faint object, high precision spectroscopy), at a modest cost and on a competitive time scale, made possible by its simple concept and the prior demonstration of CWI.

We present the first integrated multimode photonic spectrograph, a device we call PIMMS #1. The device comprises a set of multimode fibres that convert to single-mode propagation using a matching set of photonic lanterns. These feed to a stack of cyclic array waveguides (AWGs) that illuminate a common detector. Such a device greatly reduces the size of an astronomical instrument at a fixed spectroscopic resolution. Remarkably, the PIMMS concept is largely independent of the telescope diameter, input focal ratio and entrance aperture - i.e. one size fits all! The instrument architecture can also exploit recent advances in astrophotonics (e.g. OH suppression fibres). We present a movie of the instrument's operation and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

New multi-core imaging fibre bundles - hexabundles - being developed at the University of Sydney will provide simultaneous integral field spectroscopy for hundreds of celestial sources across a wide angular field. These are a natural progression from the use of single fibres in existing galaxy surveys. Hexabundles will allow us to address fundamental questions in astronomy without the biases introduced by a fixed entrance aperture. We have begun to consider instrument concepts that exploit hundreds of hexabundles over the widest possible field of view. To this end, we have characterised the performance of a 61-core fully fused hexabundle and 5 unfused bundles with 7 cores each. All fibres in bundles have 100 micron cores. In the fused bundle, the cores are distorted from a circular shape in order to achieve a higher fill fraction. The unfused bundles have circular cores and five different cladding thicknesses which affect the fill fraction. We compare the optical performance of all 6 bundles and find that the advantage of smaller interstitial holes (higher fill fraction) is outweighed by the increase in FRD, crosstalk and the poor optical performance caused by the deformation of the fibre cores. Uniformly high throughput and low cross-talk are essential for imaging faint astronomical targets with sufficient resolution to disentangle the dynamical structure. Devices already under development will have 100-200 unfused cores, although larger formats are feasible. The light-weight packaging of hexabundles is sufficiently flexible to allow existing robotic positioners to make use of them.

We describe the Cosmic Web Imager (CWI), a UV-VIS integral eld spectrograph designed for the Hale 200" telescope at the Palomar Observatory. CWI has been built specically for the observation of diuse radiation. The instrument eld of view is 60"40" with spectral resolving power of R5000 and seeing limited spatial resolution. It utilizes volume phase holographic gratings and is intended to cover the spectral range 3800A to 9500A with an instantaneous bandwidth of 450A. CWI saw rst light in July 2009, and conducted its rst successful scientic observations in May 2010.

The concept of segmenting the focal plane of an existing 8m class telescope in order to fill it with an array of several fast cameras has been developed further and in this work the status of an engineering program aimed to produce a design qualified for the construction, and to assess its cost estimates is presented. The original concept of just having simple cameras with all identical optical components other than a pupil plane corrector to remove the fixed aberrations at the off-axis field of a telescope has been extended to introduce a spectroscopic capability and to assess a trade-off between a very large number (of the order of thousand) of cameras with a small single Field of View with a smaller number of cameras able to compensate the aberration on a much larger Field of View with a combination of different optical elements and different ways to mount and align them. The scientific target of a few thousands multi-slit spectra over a Field of View of a few square degrees, combined with the ambition to mount this on an existing 8m class telescope makes the scientific rationale of such an instrument a very interesting one. In the paper we describe the different options for a possible optical design, the trade off between variations on the theme of the large segmentation and we describe briefly the way this kind of instrument can handle a multi-slit configuration. Finally, the feasibility of the components and a brief description of how the cost analysis is being performed are given. Perspectives on the construction of this spectrograph are given as well.

A mosaic of two 2k x 4k fully depleted, high resistivity CCD detectors was installed in the red channel of the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrograph for the Keck-I Telescope in June, 2009 replacing a monolithic Tektronix/SITe 2k x 2k CCD. These CCDs were fabricated at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and packaged and characterized by UCO/Lick Observatory. Major goals of the detector upgrade were increased throughput and reduced interference fringing at wavelengths beyond 800 nm, as well as improvements in the maintainability and serviceability of the instrument. We report on the main features of the design, the results of optimizing detector performance during integration and testing, as well as the throughput, sensitivity and performance of the instrument as characterized during commissioning.

Near-diffraction limited imaging and spectroscopy in the visible on large (8-10 meter) class telescopes has proved to be beyond the capabilities of current adaptive optics technologies, even when using laser guide stars. The need for high resolution visible imaging in any part of the sky suggests that a rather different approach is needed. This paper describes the results of simulations, experiments and astronomical observations that show that a combination of low order adaptive optic correction using a 4-field curvature sensor and fast Lucky Imaging strategies with a photon counting CCD camera systems should deliver 20-25 milliarcsecond resolution in the visible with reference stars as faint as 18.5 magnitude in I band on large telescopes. Such an instrument may be used to feed an integral field spectrograph efficiently using configurations that will also be described.

We present the first stringent tests of a novel calibration system based on a laser frequency comb (LFC) for radial velocity measurements. The tests were obtained with the high resolution, optical HARPS spectrograph. Photon noise limited repeatability of 9 cm s^-1 was obtained, using only little more than one of 72 echelle orders. In the calibration curve CCD inhomogeneities showed up and could be calibrated, which were undetectable with previous Th-Ar calibrations. To obtain an even higher repeatability and lower residuals, a larger spectral bandwidth is necessary. An improved version of the LFC is currently under development. The results of the latest tests will be presented.

We investigate the FRD performance of a 150 μm core fibre for its suitability to the SIDE project.¹ This work builds on our previous work² (Paper 1) where we examined the dependence of FRD on length in fibres with a core size of 100 μm and proposed a new multi-component model to explain the results. In order to predict the FRD characteristics of a fibre, the most commonly used model is an adaptation of the Gloge⁸model by Carrasco and Parry³ which quantifies the the number of scattering defects within an optical bre using a single parameter, d0. The model predicts many trends which are seen experimentally, for example, a decrease in FRD as core diameter increases, and also as wavelength increases. However the model also predicts a strong dependence on FRD with length that is not seen experimentally. By adapting the single fibre model to include a second fibre, we can quantify the amount of FRD due to stress caused by the method of termination. By fitting the model to experimental data we find that polishing the fibre causes a small increase in stress to be induced in the end of the fibre compared to a simple cleave technique.

The SPHERE is an exo-solar planet imager, which goal is to detect giant exo-solar planets in the vicinity of bright stars and to characterize them through spectroscopic and polarimetric observations. It is a complete system with a core made of an extreme-Adaptive Optics (AO) wavefront correction, a pupil tracker and diffraction suppression through a variety of coronagraphs. At its back end, a differential dual imaging camera and an integral field spectrograph (IFS) work in the Near Infrared (NIR) Y, J, H and Ks bands (0.95 - 2.32μm), and a high resolution polarization camera covers the optical range (0.6 - 0.9 μm). The IFS is a low resolution spectrograph (R~50) working in the near IR (0.95-1.65 microns), an ideal wavelength range for the detection of giant planet features. In our baseline design the IFU is a new philosophy microlens array of about 145x145 elements designed to reduce as much as possible the cross talk when working at diffraction limit. The IFU will cover a field of view of about 1.7 x 1.7 square arcsecs reaching a contrast of 10^-7, providing a high contrast and high spatial resolution "imager" able to search for planet well inside the star PSF.

The detection of Earth analogues requires extreme Doppler precision and long term stability in order to measure tiny reflex velocities in the host star. The PSF from the spectrometer should be slowly varying with temperature and pressure changes. However, variations in the illumination of the slit and of the spectrograph optics occur on time scales of seconds, primarily because of guiding errors, but also on timescales of minutes, because of changes in the focus or seeing. These variations yield differences in the PSF from observation to observation, which are currently limiting the Doppler precision. Here, we present the design of a low cost fiber optic feed, FINDS, used to stabilize the PSF of the Hamilton spectrograph of Lick observatory along with the first measurements that show dramatic improvement in stability.

In this paper, we present an original observational approach, which combines, for the first time, traditional speckle imaging with image post-processing to obtain in the optical domain diffraction-limited images with high contrast (10^-5) within 0.5 to 2 arcseconds around a bright star. The post-processing step is based on wavelet filtering an has analogy with edge enhancement and high-pass filtering. Our I-band on-sky results with the 2.5-m Nordic Telescope (NOT) and the lucky imaging instrument FASTCAM show that we are able to detect L-type brown dwarf companions around a solar-type star with a contrast ▵I~12 at 2 and with no use of any coronographic capability, which greatly simplifies the instrumental and hardware approach. This object has been detected from the ground in J and H bands so far only with AO-assisted 8-10 m class telescopes (Gemini, Keck), although more recently detected with small-class telescopes in the K band. Discussing the advantage and disadvantage of the optical regime for the detection of faint intrinsic fluxes close to bright stars, we develop some perspectives for other fields, including the study of dense cores in globular clusters. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that high contrast considerations are included in optical speckle imaging approach.

In the last six years, thanks to the very high radial velocity precision of the HARPS spectrograph, it was possible to detect 21 out of the 30 super-Earth (extrasolar planets masses below 20 times the mass of the Earth) discovered up to date. The radial velocity precision of the instrument is estimated around 80 cm/s on a single measurement. The main instrumental limitations are the wavelength calibration and the stability of the light injection. We address both factors and present the results of recent tests on the HARPS spectrograph. We have identified the laser frequency comb as the ideal wavelength calibrator, due to the width, density and flux of the lines, and to its intrinsic stability. The results from the recent tests that we performed on HARPS are encouraging. The accurate guiding of the telescope is critical to maintain a stable light distribution at the injection stage, where the light is sent into the spectrograph entrance fiber. To pursue this goal we are testing a secondary guiding system which is able to apply the guiding corrections twenty times faster than the primary guiding system.

Chinese national science project-LAMOST successfully received its official blessing in June, 2009. Its aperture is about 4m, and its focal plane of 1.75m in diameter, corresponding to a 5° field of view, can accommodate as many as 4000 optical fibers, and feed 16 multi-object low-medium resolution spectrometers (LRS). In addition, a new technique called External Dispersed Interferometry (EDI) is successfully used to enhance the accuracy of radial velocity measurement by heterodyning an interference spectrum with absorption lines. For further enhancing the survey power of LAMOST, a major astronomical project, Multi-object Exoplanet Survey System (MESS) based on this advanced technique, is being developed by Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology (NIAOT) and National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), and funded by Joint Fund of Astronomy, which is set up by National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (NSFC) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This system is composed of a multi-object fixed delay Michelson interferometer (FDMI) and a multi-object medium resolution spectrometer (R=5000). In this paper, a prototype design of FDMI is given, including optical system and mechanical structure.

We report on high-accuracy, high-resolution (< 20mas) stellar measurements obtained in the near infrared ( 2.2 microns) at the Palomar 200 inch telescope using two elliptical (3m x 1.5m) sub-apertures located 3.4m apart. Our interferometric coronagraph, known as the "Palomar Fiber Nuller" (PFN), is located downstream of the Palomar adaptive optics (AO) system and recombines the two separate beams into a common singlemode fiber. The AO system acts as a "fringe tracker", maintaining the optical path difference (OPD) between the beams around an adjustable value, which is set to the central dark interference fringe. AO correction ensures high efficiency and stable injection of the beams into the single-mode fiber. A chopper wheel and a fast photometer are used to record short (< 50ms per beam) interleaved sequences of background, individual beam and interferometric signals. In order to analyze these chopped null data sequences, we developed a new statistical method, baptized "Null Self-Calibration" (NSC), which provides astrophysical null measurements at the 0.001 level, with 1 σ uncertainties as low as 0.0003. Such accuracy translates into a dynamic range greater than 1000:1 within the diffraction limit, demonstrating that the approach effectively bridges the traditional gap between regular coronagraphs, limited in angular resolution, and long baseline visibility interferometers, whose dynamic range is restricted to 100:1. As our measurements are extremely sensitive to the brightness distribution very close to the optical axis, we were able to constrain the stellar diameters and amounts of circumstellar emission for a sample of very bright stars. With the improvement expected when the PALM-3000 extreme AO system comes on-line at Palomar, the same instrument now equipped with a state of the art low noise fast read-out near IR camera, will yield 10^-4 to 10^-3 contrast as close as 30 mas for stars with K magnitude brighter than 6. Such a system will provide a unique and ideal tool for the detection of young (<100 Myr) self-luminous planets and hot debris disks in the immediate vicinity (0.1 to a few AUs) of nearby (< 50pc) stars.

The detection and characterization of extrasolar planets by direct imaging is becoming more and more promising with the preparation of dedicated high-contrast instruments and the help of new data analysis techniques. SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast imager for Exoplanets REsearch) is currently being developed as part of the second generation instruments of the ESO-VLT. IRDIS, one of the SPHERE subsystems, will provide dual-band imaging with several filter pairs covering the near-infrared from 0.95 to 2.3 microns, among with other observing modes such as long slit spectroscopy and infrared polarimetry. This paper describes the instrument performances and the impact of instrumental calibrations on finding and characterizing extrasolar planets, and on observing strategies. It discusses constraints to achieve the required contrast of ~106 within few hours of exposure time.

CARMENES (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exo-earths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs) is a next-generation instrument to be built for the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory by a consortium of Spanish and German institutions. Conducting a five-year exoplanet survey targeting ~ 300 M stars with the completed instrument is an integral part of the project. The CARMENES instrument consists of two separate spectrographs covering the wavelength range from 0.52 to 1.7 μm at a spectral resolution of R = 85, 000, fed by fibers from the Cassegrain focus of the telescope. The spectrographs are housed in a temperature-stabilized environment in vacuum tanks, to enable a 1m/s radial velocity precision employing a simultaneous ThAr calibration.

We describe the construction and commissioning of FIRE, a new 0.8-2.5μm echelle spectrometer for the Magellan/ Baade 6.5 meter telescope. FIRE delivers continuous spectra over its full bandpass with nominal spectral resolution R = 6000. Additionally it offers a longslit mode dispersed by the prisms alone, covering the full z to K bands at R ~ 350. FIRE was installed at Magellan in March 2010 and is now performing shared-risk science observations. It is delivering sharp image quality and its throughput is sufficient to allow early observations of high redshift quasars and faint brown dwarfs. This paper outlines several of the new or unique design choices we employed in FIRE's construction, as well as early returns from its on-sky performance.

KMOS is a near-infrared multi-object integral-field spectrometer which is one of a suite of second-generation instruments under construction for the VLT. The instrument is being built by a consortium of UK and German institutes working in partnership with ESO and is now in the manufacture, integration and test phase. In this paper we present an overview of recent progress with the design and build of KMOS and present the first results from the subsystem test and integration.

GNOSIS is an OH suppression unit to be used in conjunction with existing spectrographs. The OH suppression is achieved using fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs), and will deliver the darkest near-infrared background of any ground-based instrument. Laboratory and on-sky tests demonstrate that FBGs can suppress OH lines by 30dB whilst maintaing > 90% throughput between the lines, resulting in a 4 mag decrease in the background. In the first implementation GNOSIS will feed IRIS2 on the AAT. It will consist of a seven element lenslet array, covering 1.4" on the sky, and will suppress the 103 brightest OH lines between 1.47 and 1.70 μm. Future upgrades will include J-band suppression and implementation on an 8m telescope.

The large (~10 m) aperture of the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) coupled with the unique capabilities of the Robert Stobie Spectrograph (RSS), promises unparalleled prospects for polarimetric observations on an 8 - 10 m class telescope. RSS is a highly versatile first-generation instrument of the SALT. Results from some of the first commissioning observations with the RSS are presented. A method for reducing SALT RSS spectropolarimetry data is proposed and verified on observations of unpolarised and polarised standard stars. The results provide estimates of telescope and instrumental polarisation as well as a calibration of the instrument's polarimetric position angle offset.

We report on the development of ARCONS, the ARray Camera for Optical to Near-IR Spectrophotometry. This photon counting integral field unit (IFU), being built at UCSB and Caltech with detectors fabricated at JPL, will use a unique, highly multiplexed low temperature detector technology known as Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs). These detectors, which operate at 100 mK, should provide photon counting with energy resolution of R = E/δE > 20 and time resolution of a microsecond, with a quantum efficiency of around 50%. We expect to field the instrument at the Palomar 200" telescope in the first quarter of 2011 with an array containing 1024 pixels in a 32×32 pixel form factor to yield a field of view of approximately 10×10 arcseconds. The bandwidth of the camera is limited by the rising sky count rate at longer wavelengths, but we anticipate a bandwidth of 0.35 to 1.35 μm will be achievable. A simple optical path and compact dewar utilizing a cryogen-free adiabatic demagnetization refridgerator (ADR) allows the camera to be deployed quickly at Naysmith or Coud´e foci at a variety of telescopes. A highly expandable software defined radio (SDR) readout that can scale up to much larger arrays has been developed.

Less than 20 years after the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, exoplanetology is rapidly growing with more than one discovery every week on average since 2007. An important step in exoplanetology is the chemical characterization of exoplanet atmospheres. It has recently been shown that molecular signatures of transiting exoplanets can be studied from the ground. To advance this idea and prepare more ambitious missions such as THESIS, a dedicated spectrometer named the New Mexico Tech Extrasolar Spectroscopic Survey Instrument (NESSI) is being built at New Mexico Tech in collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NESSI is a purpose-built multi-object spectrograph that operates in the J, H, and K-bands with a resolution of R = 1000 in each, as well as a lower resolution of R = 250 across the entire J/H/K region.

The Infrared Imaging System (IRIS) is a 0.8m telescope and a 1024×1024 pixels camera (IRISCAM) with a HAWAII-1 detector array. IRIS is located at the Cerro Armazones Observatory in Chile that is operated by the Ruhr University Bochum jointly with the Universidad Católica del Norte in Antofagasta. It will be used primarily to survey star-forming regions for variability. Our goal is to discover young stellar objects undergoing accretion instabilities or rotational modulation of star spots, eclipsing binaries, and variable reflection nebulae. The telescope and the infrared camera are completed and first light was achieved in May of 2010. IRIS is currently being tested and characterized, before the longterm monitoring project will commence.

We have developed a germanium immersion grating mid-infrared cryogenic spectrograph (GIGMICS) designed for the Nasmyth focus stage of NAOJ Subaru 8.2 m telescope, which operates at N-band (8-13 μm) in wavelength with the R ~ 50,000. A single crystal germanium immersion echelle grating (30 × 30 × 72 mm) for collimated beam size of Φ28 mm was fabricated by utilizing ultra precision micro-grinding method coupled with the ELID (ELectrolytic In-process Dressing) technique (Ohmori, H. 1992)1. All optical components are arranged on the 800 mm diameter cold optical base plate (~30 K) of the cryostat. By the Si:As IBC (Impurity Band Conductor) focal plane array (FPA) detector (412 × 512 pixels, unit pixel size 30 μm) operated at 5 K simultaneously acquires ~13 % wavelength coverage for N-band. The instrument has been assembled and is now tested for the application to the gas-phase IR high-resolution spectroscopy.

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) will use a dedicated 300-fiber, narrow-band (1.5-1.7 micron), high resolution (R~30,000), near-infrared spectrograph to survey approximately 100,000 giant stars across the Milky Way. This survey, conducted as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS III), will revolutionize our understanding of kinematical and chemical enrichment histories of all Galactic stellar populations. The instrument, currently in fabrication, will be housed in a separate building adjacent to the 2.5 m SDSS telescope and fed light via approximately 45-meter fiber runs from the telescope. The instrument design includes numerous technological challenges and innovations including a gang connector that allows simultaneous connection of all fibers with a single plug to a telescope cartridge that positions the fibers on the sky, numerous places in the fiber train in which focal ratio degradation must be minimized, a large (290 mm x 475 mm elliptically-shaped recorded area) mosaic-VPH, an f/1.4 sixelement refractive camera featuring silicon and fused silica elements with diameters as large as 393 mm, three near-within a custom, LN2-cooled, stainless steel vacuum cryostat with dimensions 1.4 m x 2.3 m x 1.3 m.

MOSFIRE is a unique multi-object spectrometer and imager for the Cassegrain focus of the 10 m Keck 1 telescope. A refractive optical design provides near-IR (0.97 to 2.45 μm) multi-object spectroscopy over a 6.14' x 6.14' field of view with a resolving power of R~3,270 for a 0.7" slit width (2.9 pixels in the dispersion direction), or imaging over a field of view of 6.8' diameter with 0.18" per pixel sampling. A single diffraction grating can be set at two fixed angles, and order-sorting filters provide spectra that cover the K, H, J or Y bands by selecting 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th order respectively. A folding flat following the field lens is equipped with piezo transducers to provide tip/tilt control for flexure compensation at the 0.1 pixel level. A special feature of MOSFIRE is that its multiplex advantage of up to 46 slits is achieved using a cryogenic Configurable Slit Unit or CSU developed in collaboration with the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Micro Technology (CSEM). The CSU is reconfigurable under remote control in less than 5 minutes without any thermal cycling of the instrument. Slits are formed by moving opposable bars from both sides of the focal plane. An individual slit has a length of 7.1" but bar positions can be aligned to make longer slits. When masking bars are removed to their full extent and the grating is changed to a mirror, MOSFIRE becomes a wide-field imager. Using a single, ASIC-driven, 2K x 2K H2-RG HgCdTe array from Teledyne Imaging Sensors with exceptionally low dark current and low noise, MOSFIRE will be extremely sensitive and ideal for a wide range of science applications. This paper describes the design and testing of the instrument prior to delivery later in 2010.

OCTOCAM is a multi-channel imager and spectrograph that has been proposed for the 10.4m GTC telescope. It will use dichroics to split the incoming light to produce simultaneous observations in 8 different bands, ranging from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared. The imaging mode will have a field of view of 2' x 2' in u, g, r, i, z, J, H and KS bands, whereas the long-slit spectroscopic mode will cover the complete range from 4,000 to 23,000 A with a resolution of 700 - 1,000 (depending on the arm and slit width). An additional mode, using an image slicer, will deliver a spectral resolution of over 3,000. As a further feature, it will use state of the art detectors to reach high readout speeds of the order of tens of milliseconds. In this way, OCTOCAM will be occupying a region of the time resolution - spectral resolution - spectral coverage diagram that is not covered by a single instrument in any other observatory, with an exceptional sensitivity.