Introduction to the APF

What is the APF?

The Automated Planet Finder is a 2.4m telescope on Mount Hamilton. The telescope has two Nasmyth ports, with the spectrometer on one port.

The spectrometer is an echelle with a fixed grating and cross-disperser to improve stability. A wide format CCD provides coverage from 375nm to 980nm. However, there is a ghost image in the reddest part of the data as well as fringing, making the effective cutoff at 700nm. There is an Iodine cell that can be placed in the beam of the spectrometer, if required for the science. There is also a blank piece of glass that replicates the optical path of the iodine cell so one instrument focus can be used for all observations. Depeding the aperture used, the resolution can be as low as 40,000 to as high as 120,000

Documents on the APF

Steve Vogt put together the APF Prospectus.

There is also a paper on the facility.

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