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HIRES is the high-resolution spectrograph of the European Extremely Large Telescope at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. It consists of three fibre-fed spectrographs providing a wavelength coverage of 0.4-1.8 µm (goal 0.35-2.4 µm) at a spectral resolution of 100,000. The fibre-feeding allows HIRES to have several, interchangeable observing modes including a SCAO module and a small diffraction-limited IFU in the NIR. Therefore, it will be able to operate both in seeing- and diffraction-limited modes. Its modularity will ensure that HIRES can be placed entirely on the Nasmyth platform, if enough mass and volume is available, or part on the Nasmyth and part in the Coud`e room. ELT-HIRES has a wide range of science cases spanning nearly all areas of research in astrophysics and even fundamental physics. Among the top science cases there are the detection of biosignatures from exoplanet atmospheres, finding the fingerprints of the first generation of stars (PopIII), tests on the stability of Nature’s fundamental couplings, and the direct detection of the cosmic acceleration. The HIRES consortium is composed of more than 30 institutes from 14 countries, forming a team of more than 200 scientists and engineers.

ULTRASPEC is a high-speed, spectroscopic camera based on electron-multiplying CCDs (EMCCDs) and the data acquisition system of ULTRACAM. The camera saw first light in December 2006 on the EFOSC2 spectrograph of the ESO 3.6 m telescope at La Silla. In this paper we describe the motivation behind ULTRASPEC, present an outline of its design and report on its measured performance. The results show that EMCCDs are likely to revolutionise astronomical spectroscopy. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.

We describe the integration and test phase of the construction of the VISTA Infrared Camera, a 64 Megapixel, 1.65 degree field of view 0.9-2.4 micron camera which will soon be operating at the cassegrain focus of the 4m VISTA telescope. The camera incorporates sixteen IR detectors and six CCD detectors which are used to provide autoguiding and wavefront sensing information to the VISTA telescope control system. imaging performance between 0.9µm and 2.5µm. The camera is roughly 3m in length, has a total mass of 2,900kg, and will be the largest infrared camera ever built, both in terms of field of view and number of detector pixels. The wide-field design of the telescope requires active control of the position and tilt of the secondary mirror, and the camera also includes a pair of onboard curvature sensors as well as frame-transfer CCDs for autoguiding. In the first instance VISTA will be operated as a single instrument telescope, and so the IR Camera is designed for continuous operation between scheduled yearly downtimes for essential maintenance. The camera is now essentially complete in the assembly, integration and verification (AIV) facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory undergoing final testing and awaiting shipping to Chile for integration and commissioning which is now expected to commence in November of 2006. This paper will cover the evolution of the design 5 into the final build, some lessons that can be learned from the build process of such a large cryogenic instrument, and those performances of the instrument which have been measured in the laboratory.

MOONS is a new Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph selected by ESO as a third generation instrument for the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The grasp of the large collecting area offered by the VLT (8.2m diameter), combined with the large multiplex and wavelength coverage (optical to near-IR: 0.8μm - 1.8μm) of MOONS will provide the European astronomical community with a powerful, unique instrument able to pioneer a wide range of Galactic, Extragalactic and Cosmological studies and provide crucial follow-up for major facilities such as Gaia, VISTA, Euclid and LSST. MOONS has the observational power needed to unveil galaxy formation and evolution over the entire history of the Universe, from stars in our Milky Way, through the redshift desert, and up to the epoch of very first galaxies and re-ionization of the Universe at redshift z>8-9, just few million years after the Big Bang. On a timescale of 5 years of observations, MOONS will provide high quality spectra for >3M stars in our Galaxy and the local group, and for 1-2M galaxies at z>1 (SDSS-like survey), promising to revolutionise our understanding of the Universe. The baseline design consists of ~1000 fibers deployable over a field of view of ~500 square arcmin, the largest patrol field offered by the Nasmyth focus at the VLT. The total wavelength coverage is 0.8μm-1.8μm and two resolution modes: medium resolution and high resolution. In the medium resolution mode (R~4,000-6,000) the entire wavelength range 0.8μm-1.8μm is observed simultaneously, while the high resolution mode covers simultaneously three selected spectral regions: one around the CaII triplet (at R~8,000) to measure radial velocities, and two regions at R~20,000 one in the J-band and one in the H-band, for detailed measurements of chemical abundances. © (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.