Bibcode
Pasquini, Luca; Castillo, Roberto; Dekker, Hans; Hanuschik, Reinhard; Kaufer, Andreas; Modigliani, Andrea; Palsa, Ralf; Primas, Francesca; Scarpa, Riccardo; Smoker, Jonathan; Wolff, Burkhard
Bibliographical reference
Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy. Edited by Alan F. M. Moorwood and Iye Masanori. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5492, pp. 136-147 (2004).
Advertised on:
9
2004
Citations
14
Refereed citations
13
Description
Four years after its announcement at SPIE, FLAMES, the VLT fibre
facility, has been completed, integrated into the VLT observatory and
commissioned. It has been in operation since February 2003. More than
250000 scientific (single) spectra have been obtained, which have
enabled the on-sky performance of the instrument to be compared to the
predictions. We show that in several relevant aspects the real
instrument significantly outperforms the specified astronomical
performance. Some of the early scientific results are finally presented.