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CAPABILITY & EXPERIENCE

1990-present

Since its establishment in 1990, Prime Optics has provided the Optical Design for many major new astronomical instrument developments, including:

  • 2dF: the wide field corrector for the AAT and its spectrographs. This instrument has finished a galactic red-shift survey of the southern skies and now feeds a medium-resolution spectrograph [AAOmega]. In the next couple of years it will be reconfigured to feed a high-resolution spectrograph [HERMES], the design for which was conducted by this bureau.

  • CASPIR: IR instrumentation for the MSSSO. This instrument delivered most of the early [earthbound] IR pictures of the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with the planet Jupiter.

  • AUSTRALIS: Preliminary research for the IR spectrographs for the European Southern Observatory's 8 m telescopes.

  • IRIS2: spectrograph/imager for the AAT.

  • PNS: the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph for the WHT and TNG telescopes.