High Resolution CCD Spectrography of the Visible Night Airglow

Abstract

Using iterative optical ray-tracing, two plane-grating spectrographs have been designed and constructed which work at F/1.4 with a refrigerated CCD camera having a 1152 × 289 pixel CCD chip, to make spectra of the night airglow. There is a marked gain (about ×50) in sensitivity over current instrumentation.