Fabry-Perot spectrometer for detecting a spatially varying spectral signature of an extended source

Abstract

Fabry-Perot spectrometer comprises a Fabry-Perot etalon, a pair of cylindrical lenses with parallel vertices which lenses are spaced so that they smear light from a source in a direction which is perpendicular to their vertices, a focusing lens assembly, and a detector at the focus of the focusing lens assembly. The detector lens assembly comprises two cylindrical lenses, one with a vertex parallel to the vertex of the smearing cylindrical lenses and one with a vertex perpendicular to the vertex of the smearing cylindrical lenses in order to avoid spectral aliasing. The result is that light from "slices" on the source extending perpendicular to the smearing cylindrical lens vertices is smeared at the detector so that spectral information which would otherwise be hidden by virtue of interference maximums not falling on imaged emitting points appear on the smeared slices. The spectrometer therefore provides spectral information for any given slice perpendicular to the vertex of the cylindrical lenses, such that the image on the detector contains spectral information along one direction with spatial information along the perpendicular direction.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.