Performance of FLAMES at the VLT: one year of operation

Pasquini, Luca; Castillo, Roberto; Dekker, Hans; Hanuschik, Reinhard; Kaufer, Andreas; Modigliani, Andrea; Palsa, Ralf; Primas, Francesca; Scarpa, Riccardo; Smoker, Jonathan; Wolff, Burkhard
Bibliographical reference

Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy. Edited by Alan F. M. Moorwood and Iye Masanori. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5492, pp. 136-147 (2004).

Advertised on:
9
2004
Number of authors
11
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
14
Refereed citations
13
Description
Four years after its announcement at SPIE, FLAMES, the VLT fibre facility, has been completed, integrated into the VLT observatory and commissioned. It has been in operation since February 2003. More than 250000 scientific (single) spectra have been obtained, which have enabled the on-sky performance of the instrument to be compared to the predictions. We show that in several relevant aspects the real instrument significantly outperforms the specified astronomical performance. Some of the early scientific results are finally presented.