Hydra, open to view

The WIYN Hydra fiber positioner uses a robotic "gripper" (right) on an x-y stage to move buttons containing optical fibers to appropriate locations in a thirty arc minute field (left). Roughly 100 fibers can be deployed at the same time. Each of these fibers then feeds light to a single spectrograph (downstairs), allowing data to be recorded from 100 objects at once. You can also see a close-up of the gripper, and a separate view of the focal plane.