CRIRES - CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph

Summary

The VLT cryogenic high-resolution infrared echelle spectrograph CRIRES is located at the Nasmyth focus A of UT1 (Antu). It provides a resolving power of up to 10⁵ in the spectral range from 1 to 5.3μm when used with a 0."2 arcsec slit. CRIRES can boost all scientific applications aiming at fainter objects, higher spatial (extended sources), spectral and temporal resolution. Simultaneous spectral coverage is maximized through a mosaic of four Aladdin III InSb arrays providing an effective 4096 x 512 focal plane detector array in the focal plane. Adaptive Optics (MACAO - Multi-Applications Curvature Adaptive optics) is used to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio and the spatial resolution.

Publications based on data obtained with the CRIRES instrument should quote the following reference paper: Käufl, H.U. et al. 2004, SPIE, 5492, 1218 .

Contact Information

• Questions related to service mode observations and proposal preparation should be addressed to the User Support Department.
• Questions related to visitor mode observations should be addressed to Paranal Science Operations
• Please send us your comments, suggestions and report errors and inaccurate statements in the web pages and manuals.

Content of these pages

The following items are available on all the CRIRES pages, using the bar on the left.

• Overview: a short description of the instrument
• News: list of changes affecting the instrument and/or its pages.
• Instrument Description: all the important parameters of the instrument.
• Manuals: links to all the documents related to CRIRES.
• Tools: a collection of useful tools and informations for preparing and analyzing the CRIRES observations.
• Instrument Operations Team
• Visitor Instructions: Instrument specific instructions for Visiting Astronomers
• Science: Science done with CRIRES, incl. during Science Verification