Optical matching for fiber optic spectroscopy

Abstract

Single silica fibers of the type developed for communications are useful in the design of astronomical spectrographs. They can be used to couple light from many objects over a wide field to a single spectrograph, or to eliminate wavelength errors from image motion and gravitational flexure. For many applications it will be advantageous to use small lenses to make the most efficient coupling into and out of a fiber. If the telescope pupil is imaged on the fiber core, an efficient coupling can be made that preserves image size over a certain range. This method is demonstrated by a laboratory test using sapphire spheres as coupling lenses.