William Herschel
Telescope
The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph
(PN.S)
First light: 16 July 2001.
De-commissioned:
Designed and built by:
Anglo-Australian Observatory, Kapteyn Institute, the Netherlands, Mt Stromlo
and Siding Springs Observatory, Australia, ESO, Garching.
Description: Planetary
Nebulae (PNe) are excellent probes of a distant galaxy's rotational dynamics.
Through their strong [OIII] emission line at 5007Å rest wavelength
they can be easily detected and their radial velocity determined. In addition,
it is now widely accepted that their luminosity in the [OIII] line (for
an ensemble of PNe this is called the PNLF - Planetary Nebula Luminosity
Function) has a fairly sharp bright-end cutoff, which means that they can
be used as `standard candles' in determining distances. The PNS project
aims to build a dedicated Planetary Nebula Spectrograph in order to push
this technique to its limit.
Some scientific highlights:
More information: PN.S web pages
More photos of this instrument: http://www.ing.iac.es/PR/archive/wht/instruments.html
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