Open AccessLunar occultations of sources in the near‐infrared towards the Galactic Centre
Author(s) -
Chandrasekhar T.,
Baug Tapas
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.058
H-Index - 383
eISSN - 1365-2966
pISSN - 0035-8711
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17172.x
Subject(s) - physics , occultation , angular resolution (graph drawing) , astronomy , galactic center , astrophysics , telescope , k band , infrared , angular diameter , very large telescope , limiting , limiting magnitude , near infrared spectroscopy , stars , optics , mechanical engineering , mathematics , combinatorics , engineering
The rare passages of the moon's disc in the high stellar density region in the vicinity of the Galactic Centre provides an opportunity of using lunar occultation (LO) technique in the near‐infrared (near‐IR) region to study occulted sources at high angular resolutions of a few milliarcseconds. During one such passage we have observed a dozen events successfully in the K band using the fast subarray mode of operation of the NICMOS IR camera attached to the 1.2‐m telescope at Mt Abu, India. The minimum approach to Galactic Centre during the observations was . A detailed analysis of the occultation light curves and limiting angular resolution of this method shows that majority of the sources are unresolved . In three cases the sources are found to have angular sizes larger than the resolution limits of the technique used.