TEACHING - NEW! A provisional program of the Master-variant Instrumentation and Informatics in Physics, Astronomy and Space Research , starting in September 2005, is now available!      VISIR The mid-IR region is optimal for the study of "hot" dust (100 - 500 K) and of the gaseous component through a large number of ionic, atomic lines and molecular bands. The huge sky background makes it a hostile region to work in from the ground, but with very large telescopes such as ESO's VLT it will be possible to do science that can compete with satellites such as IRAS and ISO. VISIR is an infrared imager/spectrograph built by Saclay (Paris) and ASTRON, with strong involvement from the Kapteyn Institute. The instrument will be put on one of the VLT telescopes in the first half of 2004. WEB PAGE: http://www.eso.org/instruments/visir/ I am involved as instrument scientist in the construction of the VISIR spectrograph. Watch this space! Commissioning results coming soon!     SAURON SAURON is an integral field spectrograph, built by a consortium consisting of the Observatoire de Lyon, the Sterrewacht Leiden, the Oxford University and NOVA. It has been operating since 1999 on the WHT at La Palma. It provides information about the kinematics of gas and stars, as well as stellar populations in an area of 40x30'' on the sky. SAURON is strongly linked with a scientific project which main goal is to understand the formation and evolution of elliptical and lenticular galaxies and of spiral bulges from 3D-observations. Details about the instrument can be found in Bacon et al. (2002),  MNRAS 326, 23. WEB PAGE: http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/sauron/ I am one of the SAURON team members. At present we are producing a massive amount of science with SAURON. In Groningen also Kambiz Fathi, Katia Ganda, Emma Allard and Neil Nagar are working with SAURON data.       OmegaCAM OmegaCAM is a 1 square degree wide field, optical, 16k x 16k CCD camera for the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at Paranal observatory in Chile, which is expected to become operational at Paranal during the year 2005. OmegaCAM is built in collaboration with institutes in Italy and Germany. In Groningen the OmegaCEN group is developing software to handle the enormous dataflow that will come from OmegaCAM once it is operational. WEB PAGE: http://www.astro.rug.nl/~omegacam/ We are waiting impatiently for the VST and OmegaCAM to be ready to observe huge areas on the sky.       OASIS The optical integral-field spectrograph OASIS, built by the Observatoire de Lyon, formerly at the CFHT, has moved permanently to the WHT. It is now installed at one of the science ports of the adaptive optics system NAOMI, in the WHT's new AO-dedicated, temperature-controlled, Nasmyth enclosure GRACE. OASIS was successfully commissioned on-sky with NAOMI in July 2003. The main difference between SAURON and OASIS is that OASIS, with a much smaller field, is able to obtain a much higher spatial resolution. OASIS is the only Integral Field Spectrograph in the world coupled to an Adaptive Optics System. WEB PAGE: http://www.ing.iac.es/Astronomy/instruments/oasis/ A ground-layer adaptive optics system has just been funded by NWO.   More Instrumentation Information can be found on the Kapteyn Institute Instrumentation Homepage.

Designed by Adrian Design