X-shooter, the new wide band intermediate resolution spectrograph at VLT (Vernet et al.)

Vol. 536
In section 13. Astronomical instrumentation

X-shooter, the new wide band intermediate resolution spectrograph at the ESO Very Large Telescope

Many scientific topics, from nearby intrinsically faint stars to bright sources at the edge of the universe, benefit from wide instantaneous wavelength coverage at high efficiency. X-shooter is a high throughput single-target spectrograph installed on the ESO VLT, which obtains an intermediate resolution visible to a near-IR (0.3 to 2.5 micrometer) spectrum in a single exposure. The design uses dichroic splitters to feed cross-dispersed echelle spectrographs optimized for three wavelengths ranges. The instrument was installed on the VLT in 2009, and has already produced several refereed papers.