From its origins, the Instrumentation Division has participated in the construction of instrumentation to detect and analyze light in the visible range of the spectrum. Cameras, spectrographs, polarization analyzers, optical fibers fed systems, among others, have been designed, built, integrated and verified in our facilities.
HARMONI is one of the three ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) first light scientific instruments. It is a visible and near-infrared (0.47 to 2.45 µm) integral field spectrograph, providing the ELT's core spectroscopic capability, over a range of resolving powers from R (≡λ/Δλ) ~4000 to R~20000.
ESPRESSO is a fiber-fed, cross-dispersed, high resolution, Echelle spectrograph which can be operated with one or up to 4 Unit Telescopes (UTs) of ESO’s VLT.
OSIRIS is a camera and intermediate spectrograph in operation in the GTC telescope. OSIRIS has various observation modes: direct image, wide slit and multi-slit, which can be combined with charge shuffling and tunable filters. It includes a focal plane mask loader for multi-object spectroscopy.
New multi-object spectrograph planned for the 4.2m William Herschell Telescope (WHT) located in the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, on La Palma island.
ANDES (ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph) is an instrument under study for ESO’s forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). The contract to begin design studies for ANDES, formerly known as HIRES, was signed in 2016 by ESO. IAC is one of the more than 30 institutions in the ANDES consortium.
