A Program to Detect and Characterize Extra-Solar Giant Planets

Abstract

The upgrade to the AFOE spectrograph at the 1.5-m Tillinghast telescope at FLWO Observatory, described in detail in the previous progress report, was completed. Work included installing a new CCD detector (using SA0 internal funds) to replace the previous detector, which had failed after many thermal cyclings during the previous nearly ten years of operation. The new detector (a back-illuminated Marconi 2K x 2K detector) shows excellent quantum efficiency, and employs dual readout channels to keep the readout time as short as 20 seconds. Tests of the attainable radial velocity precision of the upgraded spectrograph with the new detector show an improvement in radial velocity detection efficiency by a factor of about 10 over the previous AFOE configuration, allowing us to push the photon-noise-limited doppler precision of 7 m/s to correspondingly fainter stars. This work was carried out by Co-investigator Sylvain Korzennik, along with the late Peter Nisenson.