Welcome

In this webpage you can find detailed and updated information on the MEGARA instrument. Please, if you are interested in hearing more on the status and capabilities of MEGARA you can contact us at agil@ucm.es and we will try to arrange a visit to your center asap.

In this link you can also find a description of the plans for the exploitation of the MEGARA Guaranteed Time and targets to be observed as part of it.

MEGARA (Multi-Espectrógrafo en GTC de Alta Resolución para Astronomía) is a facility instrument designed for the 10.4m GTC telescope in La Palma (Spain). Since its installation at GTC on 2017, MEGARA offers two different observing modes to the community, the Large Compact Bundle (LCB) mode, an Integral Field Unit (IFU) covering 12.5” x 11.3” on the sky with a spaxel size of 0.62” and a Multi-Object Spectroscopy (MOS) mode that allows observing 100 objects in a region of 3.5’ x 3.5’ around the LCB IFU. Eight of these bundles are devoted to the determination of the sky during the observation with the LCB. Each of the MEGARA MOS positioners can place a mini-bundle of 7 fibers (0.62”/fiber) with an absolute positioning requirement of 25 micron, covering an approximately circular area of 1.6" in diameter on the sky. Both the LCB IFU and MOS capabilities of MEGARA provide intermediate-to-high spectral resolutions (R~6000, 11000 and 18700).

In this webpage you can also find information on the detailed design and construction status of the instrument along with its scientific drivers as put together by our Science Team. MEGARA completed its commissioning at GTC on August 2017 and started its regular operations on July 2018.

MEGARA@GTC The MEGARA consortium is responsible for the design and construction of the instrument and includes the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM, Spain), the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE, México), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC, Spain), and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM, Spain). Main private contractors are FRACTAL (Spain) and AVS (Spain). Other contractors include SEDI (France), Wasatch Photonics (USA), AMUS (Germany), GMV (Spain) and Hellma Materials GmbH.

The PI (Armando Gil de Paz) and the Science Group at UCM belong to GUAIX, the UCM group of Extragalactic Astrophysics and Astronomical Instrumentation, part of the "Departamento de Astrofísica y CC. de la Atmósfera".



 Follow us
Follow us in Twitter Follow us in Facebook