Small and compact scientific payloads may be easily designed constructed and own on high altitude balloons. Despite the fact that large orbital observatories provide accurate observations and statistical studies of remote and/or faint space sources, small telescopes on board balloons or rockets are still attractive because of their low cost and rapid response time. We describe here a near ultraviolet (NUV) spectrograph designed to be own on a high{altitude balloon platform. Our basic optical design is a modified Czerny-Turner system using off the shelf optics. We compare different methods of aberration corrections in such a system. We intend the system to be portable and scalable to different telescopes. The use of reflecting optics reduces the transmission loss in UV. We plan on using an image intensified CMOS sensor operating in photon counting mode as the detector of choice.

Date Published: 15 June 2015
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9654, International Conference on Optics and Photonics 2015, 96540D (15 June 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2181749

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9654:
International Conference on Optics and Photonics 2015
Kallol Bhattacharya, Editor(s)