Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera Commissioned

  • 03 Mar 2021

An indigenous spectrograph named Aries-Devasthal Faint Object Spectrograph & Camera (ADFOSC) has been successfully commissioned on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT), the largest in the country and in Asia, near Nainital, Uttarakhand.

  • ADFOSC is designed and developed by Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital.
  • It can locate sources of faint light from distant quasars and galaxies in a very young universe, regions around supermassive black-holes around the galaxies, and cosmic explosions.
  • Such spectroscopes were so far imported from abroad involved high costs. It is about 2.5 times less costly compared to the imported ones.
  • The spectroscope, the largest of its kind among the existing astronomical spectrographs in the country.