CRIRES is dead. Long live CRIRES+

The old CRIRES (oCRIRES) served its time at one the 8-metre Very Large Telescope from the European Southern Observatory and enabled pretty cool science. It was high time for an upgrade though. The instrument is now back at the telescope, seriously refurbished: better simultaneous wavelength coverage thanks to the new cross-dispersed design, new detectors, spectropolarimetric capabilities, improved pipeline rewritten from scratch, etc…

Image from ESO.

Photograph showing the CRIRES+ spectrograph at the nasmyth focus of the Very Large Telescope.

What are the specs and performance?

CRIRES+ has just been commissioned (last night of second commissioning was 2021-02-24), and therefore we are still validating performance and observing modes. Numbers here are preliminary! Always check the instrument page at ESO for up-to-date information

Resolving power

R > 80,000* with the 0.2" slit
R ~ 50,000 with the 0.4" slit
* the nominal resolution should be ~100,000, but that's what we measured at commissioning. We are investigating this.

Wavelength coverage

YJHKLM bands from 0.9 to 5.2 μm in spectroscopy mode
YJHK bands in spectropolarimetry mode (normally offered from P109)

Simultaneous wavelength coverage

Around 0.3 micron (varies with wavelength). One order of magnitude better than oCRIRES

More details can be found on the ESO page.

For ESO Period 108, the instrument will be offered in limited observing modes (we only propose the modes that we have validated). This means that spectropolarimetry will not be offered. it also means that only compact sources can be observed, and that guiding has to be done on target (both with and without adaptive optics).

Apply for time!

CRIRES+ is offered in the current call for proposals from ESO for Period 108 (starting 2021-10-01).
The proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CET on 2021-03-25

This spectrum could be yours ☟!

Plot showing a near-infrared spectrum with the old CRIRES and the new CRIRES+ in the K-band. The wavelength coverage from CRIRES is larger than from the old CRIRES!

Brought to you by the CRIRES+ consortium and the European Southern Observatory

Questions? Get in touch :-)

alexis.lavail@irap.omp.eu

This webpage was edited on 2023-02-20 to update my professional email adress.