Informational Considerations in the Design of Astonomical Spectrographs

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Abstract
The problem of designing spectrographs so as to maximize their information rate on random low-contrast spectral distributions is considered. In Section 2 it is shown how spectrographs can be discussed within the general framework of Fourier optics. In Section 3 the effects of optical aberrations, of photographic spread and granularity, and of variation of slit width are briefly considered and the implications of the band-limitedness of optical images in the problem of allowing for instrumental bandwidth are pointed out. An approximate expression for the information rate is obtained in the special case of an aberration-free spectrograph.

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