Summary

The original CRIRES was removed from UT1 in July 2014 for an upgrade and not offered from P94 onwards. CRIRES was installed on the UT3 Nasmyth B focus in Period 104. Comissioning of the instrument is still pending. Depending on the results of the commissioning, CRIRES will be offered for Period 107. Before then there will be a science verification.

The CRIRES plus upgrade project is described on the following webpage

The VLT cryogenic high-resolution infrared cross dispersed echelle spectrograph CRIRES is located at the Nasmyth focus B of UT3 (Melipal). It provides a resolving power of either 50,000 or 100,000 in the spectral range from 0.95 to 5.2μm when used with a 0.4 or  0.2 arcsec slit. As part of the upgrade, linear and circular polarisation capabilities have been added in the YJ and HK bands. CRIRES offers relatively high spatial (extended sources), spectral and temporal resolution. Spectral coverage is maximized through the use of a cross disperser and a mosaic of three Hawaii H2RG arrays providing an effective 6144 x 2048 pixel focal plane detector. Adaptive Optics (MACAO - Multi-Applications Curvature Adaptive optics) is used to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio and the spatial resolution.

Publications based on data obtained with the original CRIRES instrument (data taken up to August 2014) should quote the following reference paper: Käufl, H.U. et al. 2004, SPIE, 5492, 1218 . Data taken with the upgraded CRIRES should additionally reference Dorn, R.J. et al., ESO Messenger, 2014, 156, p7

Contact Information

• Questions related to service mode observations and proposal preparation should be addressed to the User Support Department.
• Questions related to visitor mode observations should be addressed to Paranal Science Operations
• Please send us your comments, suggestions and report errors and inaccurate statements in the web pages and manuals.

Content of these pages

The following items are available on all the CRIRES pages, using the bar on the left.

• Overview: a short description of the instrument
• News: list of changes affecting the instrument and/or its pages.
• Instrument Description: all the important parameters of the instrument.
• Manuals: links to all the documents related to CRIRES.
• Tools: a collection of useful tools and informations for preparing and analyzing the CRIRES observations.
• Instrument Operations Team
• Visitor Instructions: Instrument specific instructions for Visiting Astronomers
• Science: Science done with CRIRES, incl. during Science Verification