AMBER is the General User near infrared focal instrument of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer. Its a single mode, dispersed fringes, three telescopes instrument. A limiting magnitude of the order of H=13 will allow to tackle a fair sample of extra galactic targets. A very high accuracy, in particular in color differential phase and closure phase modes gives good hope for very high dynamic range observation, possibly including hot extra solar planets. The relatively high maximum spectral resolution, up to 10000, will allow some stellar activity observations. Between this extreme goals, AMBER should have a wide range of applications including Young Stellar Objects, Evolved Stars, circumstellar material and many others. This paper tries to introduce AMBER to its future users with information on what it measures, how it is calibrated and hopes to give the readers ideas for applications.

Date Published: 21 February 2003
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 4838, Interferometry for Optical Astronomy II, (21 February 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.459113

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4838:
Interferometry for Optical Astronomy II
Wesley A. Traub, Editor(s)