BACHES (white instrument) mounted on one of the Solaris telescopes.
BACHES (Basic eCHElle Spectrograph, pothole in Spanish) is a lightweight and compact medium resolution echelle spectrograph (R ~ 20 000) manufactured by Baader Planetarium GmbH based on a technology transfer deal with the Max-Planck-Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. To integrate the spectrograph with the existing imaging train at the telescope, a guide and acquisition module (GAM) has been designed and manufactured specifically for the project. GAM is a modular construction that has one optical input port and two optical output ports. Switching between them is realized with a motorized flip mirror. This enables us to remotely switch between photometry and spectroscopy without the need of mechanically reconfiguring the imaging train. The installation and commissioning of the spectrograph has been accomplished in two phases. The first one took place December 2013 in the Solaris-4 observatory in Argentina, where a preproduction version has been evaluated. In March 2014, a production version has been installed on the Solaris-1 telescope in South Africa.
Engineering model of the spectrograph with cameras (yellow), GAM (red), filter wheel (green) and photometric CCD camera (blue).
Illustrations: Stanisław Kozłowski.
