Niels Bohr Institute > Research > Astronomy > Instrument Development

Stars and Galaxies Instrument Development

All the new Astronomical research depends on new instruments and the instruments cannot be developed without the researchers themselves – only they know what they will use, and precisely how they should work. So researchers also need to be inventors.

New Technique. At the Niels Bohr Institute, the astronomers have, together with a team of engineers and technicians, such great expertise in developing and building advanced new instruments for exploring space, that they receive calls from all over the world about new instruments.

Specially-developed Equipment. The group is working on an instrument for one of the very large telescopes (VLT) in Chile. It is specialised equipment with advanced electronics and optics which split the light up and analyse it, so that one can get the whole spectrum from ultra-violet to infra-red light all at once. That means that when one observes e.g. supernovae and gamma rays one can get one shot of the whole spectrum which otherwise could only have been obtained by changing from one observation to another. It will be unbelievably sensitive. About a quarter of the instruments which will be ready for use at the beginning of 2009 are being made at the Niels Bohr Institute.

The Instrument Development group’s own website >>