Rugate filters for OH-suppressed imaging

Alison R. Offer; Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn

doi:10.1117/12.316821

9 July 1998 Rugate filters for OH-suppressed imaging

Alison R. Offer, Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn

Proceedings Volume 3355, Optical Astronomical Instrumentation; (1998) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.316821
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 1998, Kona, HI, United States

Abstract

Ground based observations beyond 0.68 microns are severely affected by intense and variable atmospheric OH bands that dominate the night sky spectrum. A number of OH suppression techniques have been proposed in the past using either dispersive or filter based techniques. Dispersive techniques are promising but potentially expensive and complex to implement. Filter based solutions have the advantage of being relatively cheap and easy to incorporate into existing instruments. However, the inflexibility of simple filter designs has made significant improvements in sensitivity difficult to achieve. Rugate filters are thin film filters with refractive indices that very continually through the coating. They enable the production of transmission profiles comprising a series of irregular and sharply defined band passes. In this paper we investigate the potential of rugate filters as OH suppression devices. We demonstrate through numerical simulation that it is possible to achieve almost complete suppression of the OH features in the J photometric band while retaining roughly half the spectral coverage. Such filters can potentially increase the signal to noise ratio for faint continuum sources by a factor of 2 in the J band and allow for considerably longer exposures before the detector saturates on the sky background.

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Alison R. Offer and Jonathan Bland-Hawthorn "Rugate filters for OH-suppressed imaging", Proc. SPIE 3355, Optical Astronomical Instrumentation, (9 July 1998); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.316821

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KEYWORDS

Signal to noise ratio

Transmittance

Optical coatings

Refractive index

Optical filters

Electronic filtering

Coating

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