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Field of view

There are a number of factors which limit the field of view of TAURUS-2:

An absolute limit to the field size obtainable with TAURUS-2 is the field cutoff of the collimator, which is 9 arcmin.

When order sorting filters (see gif) are placed in the focal plane, they may further limit the field of view. The scale at the input focal plane is 4.51 arcsec/mm for TAURUS-2. The diameters of all the order sorting filters available for TAURUS-2 are listed in Appendix gif. This constraint can be avoided by using filters in the pupil plane. However, using filters in the collimated beam leads to an increased risk of ghost images, and in the case of the smaller filters may cause vignetting.

The field of view of TAURUS-2 is not limited in the conventional way by the Jacquinot criterion (Journal of the Optical Society of America, vol 44, p761, 1954). At high resolutions, the field will however be limited by the width of the interference fringes. The wavelength change across a detector pixel increase with both the distance from the field centre and with the resolution, so there exists an off-axis angle beyond which the wavelength change across a single pixel is greater than the spectral resolution. For a pixel size of p micron and a resolving power R, the off-axis angle in arcmin at which this results in a a degradation of resolution by a factor of is given by:

k = 12.5 for TAURUS-2 with the f/2.1 camera
k = 23.5 for TAURUS-2 with the f/4 camera

The field size will also be limited by the amount of memory available to store the TAURUS datacube during the data acquisition process. is organised means that the field size must be an integer power of 2. The amount of memory available is currently 32 Mbyte, which taken together with the need to sample the spectral dimension properly, means that the largest datacube possible has dimensions of 25625660.



next up previous contents
Next: Spatial resolution Up: Performance Previous: Performance




Tue Aug 15 16:42:46 BST 1995