IGRINS -- A Unique Visiting Instrument at Gemini South

IGRINS and Gemini team collaboration during a site visit to Gemini South (left to right: Hwihyun Kim, Brian Chinn, Kimberly Sokal, Greg Mace, and John Good). Image credit: Kimberly Sokal (UT Austin).

The Immersion GRating INfrared Spectrometer (IGRINS) is a cross-dispersed near-infrared spectrograph with a resolving power of R=45,000 covering the H and K windows, from 1.45 to 2.5 microns, in a single exposure. Gemini is supporting the instrument team with the installation and commission of IGRINS this month at Gemini South. As a Visiting Instrument, IGRINS is ideal because it features a single observing mode and contains no moving parts. We are grateful to the IGRINS team for agreeing to support observations with the help of Gemini staff for a total of 50 nights in semester 2018A. The IGRINS visit to Gemini is supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant AST-1702267 (PI: Gregory Mace, University of Texas at Austin), and by the Korean GMT Project of KASI. Further technical details are available in papers by Yuk et al. (2010), Park et al. (2014), and Mace et al. (2016).
 
Gemini frequently hosts different Visiting Instruments at each telescope every semester, so remember to keep an eye on the calls for proposals!