BOSS Plug Plates and Spectrograph (IMAGE)

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

BOSS Plug Plates and Spectrograph

Caption

BOSS is capturing accurate spectra for millions of astronomical objects by using 2,000 plug plates that are placed at the Sloan Foundation Telescope’s focal plane. Each of the 1,000 holes drilled in a single plug plate captures the light from a specific galaxy, quasar, or other target, and conveys its light to a sensitive spectrograph through an optical fiber. The plates are marked to indicate which holes belong to which bundles of the thousand optical fibers that carry the object’s light.

Credit

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey III

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with credit as given

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