Past Projects

AAOmega
AAOmega, commissioned in 2006 and upgraded in 2014, is a general-purpose facility providing multi-object and integral field spectroscopy at the AAT. This dual beam…
Hector
Hector is a multi-hexabundle IFU fibre system and spectrograph for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). It incorporates a novel new positioning system, new-format optical fibre…
SAMI
The Sydney-AAO Multi-Object Integral-Field Spectrograph (SAMI) Galaxy Survey began in March 2013 and observed 3,000 galaxies across a large range of environments. SAMI uses…
Heimdallr
The development of integrated photonic instruments, and photonic nulling/interferometry in particular, is of great international interest and Australia is a world leader in this…
GNOSIS
GNOSIS is an OH suppression unit that was designed to retrofit the IRIS2 spectrographs. The OH suppression is achieved using fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs),…
TAIPAN
TAIPAN is a spectroscopic instrument that incorporates 150 optical fibres within individual Starbug robots that position across the 6 degree field-of-view of the UK…
PRAXIS
The primary aim of PRAXIS is to determine the full astronomical potential of the technique of using fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) for atmospheric OH…
MAORY-IFU
MAORY is a large multi-conjugate AO module under development as a first-light facility for the ESO Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). MAORY will provide a…
SkyMapper
SkyMapper is a purpose-built, optical survey telescope with a 1.35m mirror and a 268 Megapixel wide-field camera. It is located at Siding Spring Observatory…
ANU 2.3 automation
Upgrade of the 2.3m telescope at SSO into a fully automated telescope
NIFS (Gemini-N)
The Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph was commissioned in 2005/2006. NIFS was designed to go behind Altair, the AO system for Gemini North. One of…
GSAOI (Gemini-S)
The Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager features 4 Hawaii-2RG arrays, totalling over 4000×4000 pixels to cover the giant corrected field of view from GeMS…
FMOS/Echidna
Echidna is a fibre positioning robot installed on the Subaru telescope that feeds dual near-infrared spectrographs. The overall system includes a corrector and imager…
ULTIMATE-Subaru Conceptual Design
We are responsible for a number of work packages in the ambitious Subaru GLAO project (ULTIMATE), including Adaptive Optics Simulation, System Engineering, Laser Guide…
FLAMES/OzPoz
OzPoz is the multi-fiber positioner feeding the spectrographs GIRAFFE and UVES from a Nasmyth focus of on of the VLT Unit Telescopes. Together with …
NGS2
NGS2 is the Next Generation Natural Guide Star Wavefront Sensor for the Gemini GeMS system. It uses a fast Electron-Multiplied CCD as the focal…
2dF
2dF is a pick-and-place style fibre positioning system mounted at the AAT prime focus. It is designed to allow the acquisition of up to…
PAVO
The PAVO beam combiner has been operational at the CHARA array from 2008. The PAVO instrument is a 3-beam pupil-plane Fizeau beam combiner optimised…
GMTIFS
Building on its experience and expertise in optical and infrared imaging and spectroscopic instrumentation, Astralis is designing and building one of the first instruments…
HERMES
HERMES is a multi-object spectrograph commissioned at the AAT in 2014 that covers four optical bands simultaneously at a spectral resolution of ~28,000.  The…
AST3-NIR
Wide-field infrared camera for the AST3 telescope at Dome A