Telescope & Instruments

TNG is 3.58m Alt-Az telescope equipped with an active optics system. Its 2 Nasmyth foci host 5 instruments which are permanently mounted and operating. More...

Instruments

SARG is a high efficiency spectrograph designed for the spectral range from 370 up to 900 nm, and for resolution from R=29,000 up to R=164,000. SARG uses an R4 echelle grating in Quasi-Littrow mode; the beam size is 100 mm giving an RS product of RS=46,000 at order centre. Both single object and long slit (up to 30 arcsec) observing modes are possible. A dioptric camera images the cross dispersed spectra onto a mosaic of two 2048X4096 CCDs.

NICS (Near Infrared Camera Spectrometer) is the TNG infrared (0.9-2.5 µm) multimode instrument which is based on a HgCdTe Hawaii 1024x1024 array. Its observing capabilities include imaging (4.2' x 4.2' f.o.v.), high-throughput low resolution spectroscopy (RS=50-500), medium resolution spectoscopy (max-R=2500), imaging polarimetry, spectropolarimetry and, when coupled to the adaptive optics module, nearly diffraction limited imaging.

DOLORES (Device Optimized for the LOw RESolution) is a focal reducer instrument installed at the Nasmyth B focus of the TNG. The detector is a 2048 x 2048 E2V 4240 Thinned back-illuminated, deep-depleted, Astro-BB coated CCD with a pixel size of 13.5 µ. The scale is 0.252 arcsec/px which yields a field of view of about  8.6 x 8.6 arcmin. The instrument allows imaging through broad and narrow band filters as well as spectroscopic observations with resolving powers between RS=~500 and RS=~6000. A multi-slit mode, based on custom masks manufactured by a dedicate cutting machine, is also available. Please note that MOS programs are bound to strict contraints on the number of masks and on the time necessary to design and manufacture them. In particular, each program can request up to a maximum of 5 masks per night and 10 masks per observing run.