The High Etendue Multiple Object Spectrographic Telescope

Undergraduate student Hunter Rouillard flattens a holographic grating that is the primary light collector for the telescope.

This past year, NYSG funded an initiation grant to prototype a game changing telescope at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. Telescopes that detect visible light are the backbone of astronomical research. Over time, astronomers design larger and larger telescopes to harvest larger amounts of light from the faint objects they study. To see the farthest galaxies, find faint exoplanets, and to study the production of elements in the stars of the Milky Way galaxy, we need really big telescopes and especially telescopes that will be used to spread the light from these faint objects out by wavelength into spectra. NYSG funding is being used at Rennselaer to prototype a new High Etendue Multiple Object Spectrographic Telescope which could one day change the way we build the largest optical telescopes in the world and vastly improve our view of the universe. This is the decade during which we will place the Milky Way galaxy in the context of other galaxies and the evolution of the Universe.