Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
The diameter of stellar images produced by Earth-based telescopes often exceeds the width of the entrance slit of the associated spectrograph. It is not uncommon for more starlight to be wasted on the jaws of the slit than is transmitted by the slit. The purpose of an image-slicer is to redirect the light from the slit jaws into the slit; to do so, the length of the slit illuminated by starlight must be increased, either by stacking slices of the image along the slit, or by elongating the image and superimposing full-length slices of it. Thus, in order to work, an image-slicer of whatever type must lose spatial resolution of the sky along the slit.