Coudé Echelle Spectrometer (CES)

The Coudé Echelle Spectrometer (CES) is an advanced spectrograph that is housed in the 3.6 m building, just below the observing floor. It is mainly used in connection with the adjacent 1.4 m Coudé Auxiliary Telescope. Resolutions of the order of 100.000 are regularly employed to observe fine details in the spectra of stars and nebulae in the Milky Way. Recently it was also used to measure very faint, interstellar and intergalactic absorption lines in the spectrum of Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud.