A specially designed faint object spectrograph in the near-IR region from 1 to 2 micrometers is proposed for the Japanese National Large Telescope: SUBARU. The proposed instrument called OHS for SUBARU is kind of a pre-optics system capable of eliminating most of intense OH airglow emission lines from the incident beam in the J- and H-passbands. The detectivity for objects in the faintest end is supposedly enhanced with this spectroscopic filter system by removing nearly 95% of the natural sky background: the non-thermal night airglow emission. The sensitivity gain in terms of limiting magnitude in these wavelength bands is expected to be 1 to 1.5 mag, depending on the modes of observations. The expected performance of the prototype OHS when attached to SUBARU will also be presented.

Date Published: 1 June 1994
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 2198, Instrumentation in Astronomy VIII, (1 June 1994); doi: 10.1117/12.176748

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2198:
Instrumentation in Astronomy VIII
David L. Crawford; Eric R. Craine, Editor(s)