Astronomical instrumentation

Abstract:

Near infrared instrumentation at 4 and 8 meter class telescopes has grown rapidly in the past few years with the advent of 1024(2) and 2048(2) detector arrays. We present a brief review of high resolution spectroscopic capabilities available worldwide, with an eye on new developments, e.g. spatially resolved spectroscopy offered by integral field instruments.Observing at near-infrared wavelengths has its own quirks. We discuss observing strategies to get past the limits of high background (including both thermal background and background due to OH sky emission lines), Variations in atmospheric transmission, and detector constraints. Special attention is given to the subject of OH suppression/avoidance, which can significantly increase the sensitivity in the J, EI and short K windows. This is especially important for (fainter) high redshift targets, where the rest frame visible diagnostic lines are shifted into the near infrared.

Abstract:

The properties of the carbon and oxygen chemical balance in planetary nebulae (PNe) are analysed through mid infrared spectroscopy of warm dust emission features in a sample of 72 objects. The adoption of a statistical distance scale shows that the galactic disk distribution of warm dust types in PNe is rather homogeneous with height over the galactic plane, and that there is a trend for the proportion of PNe with O rich dust signatures to decrease with galactocentric radius. Models of the galactic distribution of PNe compositions require a minimum progenitor mass of 1.2 M., although the observational constraints suffer from the smallness of the sample. This initial investigation is however an incentive to pursue the use of warm dust emission in PNe to study their progenitor population in various galactic environments.