GIRAFFE

Brief description of GIRAFFE

The SAAO fibre fed echelle spectrograph - GIRAFFE - consists of two components:

(i) The head which is placed at the Cassegrain focus to collects light from the star and direct it into the fibre;

(ii) The spectrograph, constructed on an optical bench in the coude room, in which the light emerging from the fibre is dispersed and recorded by a CCD camera.

The CCD camera is controlled by a PC in the observing room. The software, called QUARTZ, has the task of setting the exposure time, reading and displaying the CCD image and also controlling various components on the GIRAFFE head, such as the arc lamp and flatfield lamps. At the end of the exposure the FITS file is transferred to the server and can be displayed and reduced via the thin client.

There are four PCs which the observer will use:

1. A RT PC called giraffe running QUARTZ.

2. A thin client system for data storage ltsp.suth.saao.ac.za.

3. A laptop running a LabView program to display the APD counts, i.e. monitor the light intensity emerging from the fibre.

4. The Linux TCS PC for autoguiding.