The Alden Dome houses a permanently mounted fiber-fed spectrograph system. The components include:
Software Bisque Paramount Me German Equatorial mount: This state of the art mount is computer controlled and has remarkable precision for pointing and long-term tracking of celestial objects.
Takahashi FRC-300 Flat Field Ritchey-Chretien telescope: With its short focal length and wide flat field, this telescope excels at deep sky imaging and light collection for sensitive instruments. Focus is achieved with a computer controlled, temperature compensating focuser.
Shelyak Instruments Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph: This instrument designed by scientists François Cochard and Olivier Thizy allows students to research such astrophysics topics as:
- Chemical composition and temperature of stars
- Stellar pulsations
- Stellar rotations
- Redshifts of stars and galaxies
- Double star systems
- Extrasolar planets detection
- Planetary composition