• DOI:10.1117/12.269000
• Corpus ID: 120965966

Atmospheric dispersion correction for the FORS Focal Reducers at the ESO VLT

@inproceedings{vila1997AtmosphericDC,
  title={Atmospheric dispersion correction for the FORS Focal Reducers at the ESO VLT},
  author={Gerardo {\'A}vila and Gero Rupprecht and Jacques Maurice Beckers},
  booktitle={Other Conferences},
  year={1997}
}

• G. Ávila, G. Rupprecht, J. Beckers
• Published in Other Conferences 21 March 1997
• Physics

The need for atmospheric dispersion correction on large telescopes is well known. Therefore it was decided to implement atmospheric dispersion correctors for FORS, the focal reducer/spectrographs of the ESO very large telescope. The boundary conditions at the VLT Cassegrain foci excluded however all previously known ADC concepts and therefore we were forced to design a new one, the longitudinal atmospheric dispersion corrector (LADC) consisting of two thin prisms with variable distance. This design has several advantages compared to the 'classical concepts:' among others it avoids tilting the pupil axis and uses only one material (silica) which has a very high transmission over the operating wavelength range of FORS (330 - 1000 nm).