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Astronomical spectroscopy in the last four decades: survival of the fittest

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Abstract

Spectroscopic astronomical instrumentation has much evolved in the last 40 years. Long-slit grating spectrographs with a photographic plate as the detector working in the 0.3–1 μm range were prevalent up to the early 1970s. The replacement of photographic plates by two-dimensional digital detectors provided gains in sensitivity of two orders of magnitude and much better photometric and radial velocity precision, and opened the 1 to 25 μm infrared domain. Another gain in speed by up to two orders of magnitude was then obtained through the development of various spectroscopic systems, each optimized for a subset of astronomical objects. This development was underpinned by a number of technological advances, in particular the development of automatic data reduction pipelines using sophisticated algorithms. With ever larger and more complex instrument systems for the present 8–10 m diameter telescopes—and soon even more for the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes, the development of an instrument is now a big enterprise, ranging all the way from long-term enabling technology efforts to management of large teams for construction and deployment over typically 7–8 years.

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Acknowledgements

The author is deeply indebted to the many individuals and organizations which have fueled the rapid development of astronomical instrumentation in the four decades covered here. I would like to apologize for having been forced to skip many clever and highly useful innovations in the field for lack of space (and no doubt in some cases from lack of insight). I have tried hard to give proper credit to the pioneers but again would like to apologize in advance for any glaring mistake or omission.

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  1. European Southern Observatory (ESO), Karl-Schwarzschild Straße 2, 85748, Garching beï München, Germany

    Guy J. Monnet

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Correspondence to Guy J. Monnet.

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Monnet, G.J. Astronomical spectroscopy in the last four decades: survival of the fittest. Exp Astron 25, 91–106 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-009-9159-4

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