The Lick Observatory Hamilton Echelle Spectrometer

Abstract

The Hamilton Echelle Spectrometer, recently installed at the coudé focus of the Shane 3-m telescope, is a high dispersion spectrograph optimized for use with large format CCD's. It was designed primarily for high resolution (R=50,000) wide bandpass spectroscopy of point-like sources down to a limiting magnitude of about V=16.5, over the 0.34 μm to 1.1 μm spectral region. Its design features a relatively large collimated beam size, the use of prisms rather than gratings for cross dispersion, minimum order separation, the use of protected silver mirror coatings throughout the system, and a fast (f/1.67) folded Schmidt camera with a flat external focal plane. Together, these features yield a very powerful spectrometer for high resolution stellar spectroscopy. This paper gives a brief description of the Hamilton spectrometer and gives several examples of its performance on astronomical objects.